Fall Foraging: 6 Easiest Fruits and Mushrooms to Forage in the Autumn

While spring and summer offer a bounty of wild food treasures, there is a cornucopia of good things to forage in fall. Fruits like native aronia and pawpaw, and imported and notoriously stinky ginkgo, ripen on trees and shrubs. Hen of the woods, one of the most delicious and easiest of mushrooms to identify, begins to appear at the base of hardwoods. Even as winter arrives and days contract with cold, wood ear mushrooms remain in season when the weather is damp. For anyone newly curious about wild food to forage or to grow (in the case of the fruit), here are six fall forages that make the season exciting. They are sustainable to gather, and easy to identify.

Photography by Marie Viljoen.

Aronia

Like apples, the fruits of aronia are known botanically as pomes. Like apples they are ready to harvest in early fall. Darkly tannic when underripe, aronia has a long season, and begins to turn black and juicy in late August. The fruit persists well after frost and is also sweeter after a cold snap’s bletting. It can be gathered earlier, but wait until entire clusters are a midnight purple; any hint of red means they are unpalatably acerbic, giving the shrub that chokeberry common name. (Scarlet-hued fruit are a different species, Aronia arbutifolia, and can be used in the same way, but yield less juice.)

Around mid-September (where I live), the first forage of aronia is plump and mouth-puckering, but ideal for juicing through a foodmill. Freeze the juice in ice trays and store in bags or a container. The frozen cubes of aronia juice can be used like red wine in cooking, adding depth and complexity to slow-cooked stews and braises. An ounce of juice shaken into a cocktail gives it an antioxidant-rich backbone (aronia in supplement form is big business). A staple is my kitchen is slow-fermented aronia, dried, and used in baking and cooking like raisins. To ferment the fruit I cover it in sugar in a jar, let it sit for weeks to months—the lid on loosely—before straining it off and bottling the syrup (you can use this elderberry syrup method for the aronia syrup). The delectable, leftover fruit is air-dried slowly on trays and it keeps indefinitely.

Ginkgo

Roasted ginkgo “nuts” might be the ultimate bar snack.

New York City’s streets and parks are richly planted with Ginkgo biloba. The trees’ tolerance of pollution and their vivid fall color make them a beloved ornamental. Female ginkgo trees bear heavy crops of fruit, which drops to the grass or sidewalk beneath when ripe. This is one of the smelliest times of the urban year. Aside from knowledgable East Asian connoisseurs who gather the fallen fruit to process in late fall (and city-dwelling raccoons and possums who love the reeking pulp), few urbanites love ginkgo for these odiferous weeks. But hidden inside that fruit is a nut-like shell. And inside that shell is a delectable treat: a pistachio-green kernel that tastes something like a roast chestnut crossed with tofu.