1889 AugSept 2017

Jeremy Faber, of Foraged and Found Edibles, scouts for mushrooms. The company supplies wild mushrooms, greens, berries and teas
to hundreds of restaurants and markets around the country.
He started this practice during an especially
fruitful porcini year—soon he was delivering the
surplus to chefs around town. He and his team
believe in the culinary and medicinal benefits of
this bounty. They don’t aim to be the first with
each season’s forage. Instead, they wait for the
right time to harvest so customers can receive
the best and freshest.
Mushrooms grow all over Washington, but
their abundance depends on the season, the
weather, that year’s snowpack, heat, rainfall and
other environmental factors. Highly popular
morels, for example, grow well the year after
wildfires, so foragers covet affected regions.
“It takes a lot of being in the woods, on the
ground, scouting out patches of mushrooms and
remembering for the following year," Augustine
said. Chanterelles typically pop up around Mount
Rainier in the summer and coastal Washington
as summer progresses, while lobster mushrooms
also thrive around Rainier. Foraging can consist
of long days with early start times, miles-long
hikes into the wilderness and overnight camping.
Until recently relocating to a Georgetown
space, Foraged and Found ran its Seattle
warehouse out of Faber’s Phinney Ridge
basement, which Augustine described as
“smelling like a giant mushroom … the scent
of Earth.” The expansion of the business means
a deepening of cooperation with Lao and
Cambodian foraging families, with whom the
company has a long-standing relationship.
Foraged and Found’s consistently popular items
include morels and chanterelles, “the bread-and-
butter” mushroom that every chef wants on the
menu, plus stinging nettles in the spring and
huckleberries in late summer. “[Faber] is always
trying to add something new to the list—it’s very
important to him,” Augustine said.
Faber insists on sourcing indigenous goods
whenever possible. Products are harvested solely
in North America, with a focus on the Pacific
Northwest. After expanding the business to New
York and Boston, however, Forage and Found has
also begun harvesting regionally in the Northeast.
Loyal Seattle customers include James Beard
Foundation Award-winning chefs Matt Dillon,
Tom Douglas, Jerry Traunfeld and James Beardnominated
Ethan Stowell. In addition to these
restaurants, Foraged and Found’s bounty can
be sampled at Seattle venues such as Spinasse,
Altura, Copine and Harvest Beat. (In New York,
clients include Gramercy Tavern, Daniel and
Le Bernardin.)
Augustine points those interested in foraging
toward the Puget Sound Mycological Society
(“one of the best in the country” for educational
talks and fields trips). “Forage for wild edibles
with caution, and learn from an experienced
harvester,” Cascadia Mushrooms' Winstead
advised. “The time you take to learn about and
gather the wild foods growing in this region will
bring you closer to the heart of our home.”
Week after week in farmers markets,
Augustine divines an emerging trend. “There’s
a certain mysticism surrounding foraging. …
I think there’s a real hunger for people to find
that again.”
28 1889 WASHINGTON’S MAGAZINE AUGUST | SEPTEMBER 2017