Alan Bergo is not your ordinary outdoors guru. Some might even call him quirky, but he’s more down to earth — in a much more literal way — than a lot of others who don’t share the same characteristics. That’s mainly because he uses the land in ways the typical grocer does not: he forages it and uses what he finds in a variety of unique recipes.

For starters, he’s not afraid to eat wild mushrooms, he knows how to make dandelion ice cream and when he talks about eating chicken, he’s usually not referring to the typical farm-raised dinner.

But for all of his traits, he doesn’t approach these tasks willy-nilly. At the outset, he says a lot of time and energy has been spent over the years honing his knowledge about the many varieties of wild berries, plants and mushrooms in his home state of Minnesota. He knows what is safe to eat and what is not, and cautions anyone who has an interest in foraging to put in the time and effort to make sure they know what they’re doing.

It can be a great way to flex a new muscle, he says — and a good excuse to get outdoors.

The Forager Chef

Bergo, of St. Paul, is a multi-talented and James Beard Award-winning chef with a reputation that has crossed climes and countries. Better known as the Forager Chef, Bergo today runs a thriving online business that keeps him creating new meals from his foraging forays. Over the years he’s amassed a large collection of his own recipes, or variations of others. His is a different lifestyle than he expected when he first embarked on a career to become a master chef, but it is one he wouldn’t trade for the best restaurant in the business.

Alan Bergo. Contributed / Andy Berndt

“I would say I’m industry adjacent now,” he says. “It’s all I ever knew and have been really blessed to be able to adapt and pivot and broaden what I get to talk about and do my own thing.”

Bergo once worked as the executive chef at Lucia’s Restaurant and The Salt Cellar, located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, respectively, but today he is one of the leading culinary authorities on mushroom hunting and foraging. His dishes may be considered the most organic of organically prepared foods, because the ingredients come from the wilds of Mother Nature.

It was a slow burn getting started.

At one time, Bergo didn’t care for the word “foraging,” preferring instead to be called a mushroom hunter and gatherer. But he told the Grand Forks Herald that his views have changed over time and he now is happy to be known by his current title as the Foraging Chef and touts it on his website, foragerchef.com, letting the world know he hunts mushrooms, wild and other obscure food.

Looking back at the beginnings of his career, Bergo says he always had confidence in his ability to make just about any dish a person could throw at him. His goal when he was working for other establishments was to improve his skills and abilities and to move up the ladder, so to speak, by working at better and better restaurants. Now, he just wants to be the best foraging chef he can be.

Porcini mushrooms, such as these, may be found in Minnesota. Contributed / Alan Bergo

He does appreciate the things he learned early on, especially when he started seeing the interesting ingredients used in some of the meals he prepared, which prompted him to start investigating more edible plants and berries and mushrooms.

He said when he worked at Heartland, a now-defunct farm-to-table restaurant in the Twin Cities that would use Minnesota products within 200 miles, he started seeing “there were all kinds of ingredients, so many different ingredients that I had never seen before,” he says. Sometimes after work he’d play disc golf and while on a course he’d notice plants that were on the restaurant menu.

“I saw chicken of the woods the day after I put one on the menu, and so I was kind of spoon-fed a lot of the things that were in our area before I’d ever seen them outside.” Instead of going afield with a mentor — although he says that is valuable for someone typically starting out foraging — “I already knew what I was looking for. I knew when it was available, I knew how to cook it and how to store it. It was like speed-learning and it really gave me a great jump start.”

He also started to notice that some restaurants framed their ingredients not as plants but as luxury eating.

“From there I noticed this was something I could do for free: go and pick mushrooms,” but not before reading every book he could find on mycology relevant to Minnesota. If one of his outdoor excursions didn’t produce mushrooms, he’d observe plants and soon started reading about them, too.

Now he’s become an expert — although he admits he is still learning — and besides his website, he has published a book, “The Forager Chefs Book of Flora.” A second book will be published early next year, and he has a third planned after that. He also takes his own photos, manages his website and is an influencer who has attracted the attention of media across the country.

He says he never expected that his excursion into the outdoors would become his job, in which he manages a website and thriving business, but through hard work on the culinary scene that is what much of it entails.

Chicken of the woods

Although Bergo lives in St. Paul, he is familiar with good places to forage across the state and says northwest Minnesota is a terrific place to find wild berries and edible plants, including nature’s chicken — otherwise known as chicken of the woods.

Alan Bergo shows off chicken of the woods, a type of wild mushroom. Contributed / Alan Bergo

Bergo says his worldview of cooking changed when he found his first chicken of the woods — a gnarly-looking mushroom that resembles something that grows in the ocean but instead is found in wooded areas. It was his first big gulp while being spoon-fed knowledge about wild species and foraging for them.

He knew what a chanterelle mushroom was because he’d “seen it, cooked it, tasted it, smelled it and put it on the menu,” he says. “But then I learned that we have different varieties here in Minnesota. There’s a whole world that I kind of tripped over.” Chicken of the woods was his first trip.

Chicken of the woods often grow on trees. Contributed / Alan Bergo

"Chicken of the woods is one of the most commonly eaten mushrooms. You have tons of them in northern Minnesota, and it’s their season right now,” between about June and September. They are a type of parasite that causes heart rot inside of trees, but he says they are “a safe variety of mushroom” to eat and easy to identify. They get their name because of their taste.

“The yellow ones,” he says, “will grow in a rosette pattern, generally above roots on the ground, whereas the orange ones typically grow in a shelf pattern on a tree; but the white ones are the better ones and taste a little like chicken.”

Flexing muscles

Bergo says his website gets a lot of traffic from people all over the world, but it is geared toward the people in Minnesota. “It’s just one tool they can use combined with a bunch of others,” he says.

Foraging, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, has become a burgeoning hobby and lifestyle for many people and attracts new newcomers all the time. For those starting out, Bergo says people should be aware of Minnesota and federal laws. For instance, mushrooms can be harvested in state parks but not national parks.

He says, “You’ll want to make sure wherever you’re going on public lands that it’s OK to pick, so do your research before you go out. State parks are great. State forests are great, too. Mushrooms, nuts and berries are all things you can harvest.”

The interesting thing about mushrooms is how quickly they grow. A person could go out to pick mushrooms every couple of months during the season and see a whole new variety of species in an area, depending on what kind of forest the person is...

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