[Narrator] This program made possible by Forest River.

(tranquil music) We have always been dedicated to helping people experience the joy of the outdoors by building a full range of recreational vehicles.

At Forest River, your needs, interest, and lifestyle are at the forefront of everything we do.

Forest River, follow the river.

To learn more, visit forestriver.tv.

Look at that.

See, if I hadn't have sat down here, I never would've noticed that a bird had walked by and lost bits of its down feather on a cut branch on this stump.

Well, that's definitely not anything risky, but the truth of the matter is that when you gather wild edible plants, there are risks associated with that.

There are poisonous plants.

There are plants that you shouldn't touch.

You don't know if you may have allergies.

Well, the reality is that you will not learn everything you need to know from this show.

The safe way to partake of the Wild Harvest is to learn from the books, go online and learn, but most importantly, connect with a local expert.

They will be passionate about teaching you everything from mushrooms, to plants, to trees, and all the safe ways to enjoy the wild harvest.

(tranquil music) You know I'm always talking about how the wild harvest is right outside your door.

Forging is on the edges of your driveway.

It's the park at the end of the street, your friend's cottage.

And I stand by that.

And big adventuring, that's not for everyone, but sometimes the wild harvest and adventuring, they do meet up.

You go beyond your street, park at the end of it, and you find yourself smack dab in the middle of an adventure and wild harvest.

(upbeat music) So I just love this, the ambiance of being on a liveaboard dive yacht.

I come here, spend maybe ah six, seven days.

There's other people all just here to dive for a week, and it is just the best.

Well I thought I'd bring Paul down to the tropics and do a little wild harvest down here.

But first I wanna go and get beneath the waves.

(tranquil music) (water splashing) There's a creature down here that's just come into season, but it's illegal to harvest them with scuba diving gear.

To harvest them, I have to free dive, which in many cases means going down as deep as 40 to 60 feet.

(tranquil music) In North America, the conch is known as queen conch.

Lobatus gigas is actually a sea snail, or more technically marine gastropod mollusc.

And it's found in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

(tranquil music) (men talking) (tranquil music) Annually, a single coconut palm tree, which are being dispersed by ocean currents and humans traveling throughout the tropics, may yield up to 100 coconuts that take the whole year to ripen.

Botanically, Cocos nucifera, the coconut, is actually a fruit or what's called a drupe, commonly known as stone fruits, the same as peaches, pears, walnuts, and olives.

A coconut may be a fruit, but as it is classified as a drupe, it can have the same effect on the human body as a tree nut.

Meaning it can cause allergies or even be fatal.

The white meat inside is called copra, which is considered flammable due to their tendency to self heat, which is why you can't transport them on a plane as checked baggage.

This is brilliant actually.

(tranquil music) All right, it's time.

First of all, Ed, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you guys for having me.

Let's get right to it, 'cause I know you already know, number one, which is our conch.

Gathering those was amazing.

You follow the trails.

You look for the trails on the sand.

These things generally mature at around five to seven years of age.

And I've talked to the guys here, and they said every year they come in, they harvest, they have hundreds of pounds of it.

Come back the next year, kaboom, they're all there again.

So they've got a pretty good working relationship going, when it comes to ethically harvesting.

[Ed] And sustainability.

Yeah, so that's number one.

Ready for number two?

Well, you kinda already know this one as well, and that is going to be- [Ed] Okay.

[Les] My favorite, coconut.

Aw!

[Ed] Beautiful.

Aw!

[Ed] That's a good one.

I gotta say, Paul already knows.

I've been telling him about these for years 'cause this stuff to me is the best tasting part of the coconut.

And so what happens is when the coconut itself.

it starts to grow in the ground, and when you get the greenery coming out of the top, and it's about six to eight inches, the liquid that was once in there is now this.

This stuff is delicious.

You ready for the surprise ingredient?

[Ed] Surprise ingredient.

Let's see what we have.

All right, this was a joy to find.

How about this for an entrance to a coffee shop?

That's what I'm talking about.

This is a cafe.

I went to this little funky cafe out of the way.

They specialize in making pure cacao.

[Ed] Okay.

Pure chocolate.

This is 100% pure cacao, pure chocolate, all right?

And here's the thing.

This, this cacao has not had any alkaline added.

The alkaline that gets added is for the sake of making chocolate bars pretty.

The other part of it is that it's not been tempered, which means it's not been ah heated and turned into crystal.

It smells so good, I can't.

Let me just tell ya right now.

It's incredible.

[Les] Go for it, you know what just go for it.

I'm just telling you, it's just so- How's your palette after eating that?

[Ed] It's there.

It still hangs, it lingers, it's- Yeah, it's good.

It's intense.

It's rich.

It's beautiful.

So I just thought, you know what an interesting combination.

This is all very Belizean, right from here, and I thought you could have fun with this, but this is the real deal, man.

This is pure stuff.

So what I want you to do is you two guys just confer as two chefs what you think you wanna do.

And I don't care what you make.

Simple, complicated, doesn't matter.

It's up to you guys now.

The first thing when I ate the chocolate that stuck out to me, that I thought about was the texture of it, the chocolate and the conch.

That's the one that's gonna challenge us.

You know because the thing is, in this case, if you're gonna serve the chocolate with the conch, we need to make the chocolate savory more than sweet.

Do you know what, I can guarantee you, if we combine all three of these things no one's ever done it before.

At least I don't think anyone's done it before.

Yep.

Ha ha ah, welcome to the wild harvest.

(both laughing) The most famous use of cocoa is to make chocolate.

Rich in Theobromine, cocoa gives you the same high as without all the side effects.

It's said that cocoa is indulgen nutritive and medicinal all at o Now you know why you love chocol Oh, yeah.

Using one shell to break open the other is a traditional method used for thousands of yea and something I learned while filming the series Survivo After that's done, everyone is p to help Ed remove any part of th snail that doesn't appear white One thing that I've noticed being in the stores here in Belize is there's a variety of hot sauce everywhere.

I kind of wanna make one using the cacao, 'cause I haven't seen one before, and I have this idea of sort of a mole influenced hot sauce that just might layer into the other dishes.

Start caramelizing those onions, working with habaneros is always dangerous.

I learned my lesson a long time ago that you don't want to handle these a heck of a lot and then touch your eyes.

One of the reasons that I really love working with local fruits is it really does give you a chance to taste what grows here.

This beautiful apple pear that's grown here in Belize is, is just something that I can't resist.

I'm looking for this to add a foundational flavor to this hot sauce, something that I can puree, something that will help it become smooth.

All right, now that that's cooking and the fruit is starting to soften a little bit, I need an acid.

And I do have some cider vinegar here.

Now I just have to let that reduce.

So the one thing I have not addressed yet is capitalizing on this beautiful cacao.

What makes this so unique to use is the fact there's zero sweetness.

It's actually quite bitter.

It's pleasant, it's familiar, but it's not what it looks like.

It's not sweet chocolate.

It's the foundation of chocolate, cacao.

[Cameraman] Cacao.

Cacao.

[Cameraman] Ca-cao.

Ca-cao.

Coo-koo-ca-cao.

All right, so now that's coming together.

I just gotta blend this.

I really don't know how it's gonna turn out quite yet.

New blender.

This is a new blender moment.

(Paul laughs) (blender blending) All right, time for my first taste.

In all honesty, it's okay.

I'm not finding it's doing it for me right now.

It seems to be a little shallow in its flavor profile.

So I'm adding some salt.

One other thing that I can add to this is some nuts.

This hot sauce is inspired by a mole sauce, which always has three things.

So to make mole, you need chili peppers, cacao, and nuts.

(Paul laughing) [Cameraman] Chili peppers, cacao.

(Paul laughing) Power up.

Every place I've been in this part of the world has a curry.

Something about curry in the Caribbean go hand in hand.

So duly appropriate, I wanna make a curry sauce to go with the conch.

Some curry powder and some coconut foam.

I love this texture.

The fact that this is full of coconut juice, like you can almost squeeze it out, and if you can't see it, you can definitely feel it.

So I'm hoping that this cut small into the sauce is gonna help thicken it a little bit.

How we doing chef?

Hey, I'm good.

Good timing.

I want you to taste this.

I've just seasoned it.

Just added salt.

Maybe even give it another stir.

I was just working on stirring in some honey.

Okay.

Give it a little bit of salt and just let that cook down for a little bit.

Yeah.

And I think it'll be great.

So after my discussion with chef Paul, we decided that we will take the conch, and do the conch two ways.

We're gonna make a curry out of it, and we're gonna make a fritter to put on top of the curry to add a little bit of texture.

We're gonna go into the food processor.

Then from there, just give it a, a rough pulse.

That point we're gonna get our mixing bowl, pour our conch in.

And you can see, we have nice sized chunks that'll work well.

I'm adding my flour in until I get that fritter consistency I want.

And at this point, I'm going dig in.

The chef should touch his food, feel his food.

That way I can know where I'm at with it.

From there, gonna get your nice ball.

This oil's hot, and when you put these in, they could splash.

You need to be very careful as you lay them in, and lay them away from you.

We're gonna cook these things to my favorite kitchen term, GBD.

Okay?

Golden brown and delicious.

Hey, chef.

[Paul] How are things goin?

Well, I got my fritters done.

I think all we need to do is just chop a little bit of conch, add it into your curry.

(tranquil music) Beautiful.

[Les] Ha ha!

Well, I smell curry.

In case you wanted more.

And I see fritters.

[Ed] So what you have here is a conch curry with a conch fritter, and then a play on mole with the cacao.

So you should be able to find it in the curry.

The coconut apple is the texture that almost feels like a cooked eggplant.

And that's the best way I can describe it.

So like a braised eggplant texture.

Oh yeah, okay.

That's a wonderful texture.

It's like a mock, it's like a coconut crouton.

[Paul] It sure is.

[Les] Right?

[Paul] Yeah, that works.

[Ed] Yep.

This is deceptively simple, but it's complex on my tongue.

The first splash is very buttery and creamy.

This is a dish that all of these flavors, they really are washing over every part of my tongue and giving the tongue of different experience from the tip right to the back, including the sides.

It's a really weird, I've never experienced this before.

Usually it's this, or it's that, or it's at that spot, but this was three different, three different move- It's like a musical piece.

It's three different movements in eating this.

I'm calling it a win.

It's an interesting thing that happened to us when we were initially tasting the ingredients.

Both of us made the assumption that cacao and the coconut would kind of come together like chocolate and sweet coconut.

And it didn't.

In fact it didn't work at all.

It tasted like soap, the combination.

It was terrible.

That's not good.

[Ed] No, it was horrible.

Yeah.

[Ed] Threw us for a loop.

We had to sit down and try to figure out and rework the whole thing that we thought we were gonna do.

Okay, well, I mean, it's always gonna be an adventure, and we've got more to do here, but I like all of it.

The curry dish, the fritters, and then there's this really interesting triple flavor profile.

And this was a really nice journey.

And I know I've got another journey to participate in.

Why don't you guys take care of whatever this next dish is?

[Ed] Sounds good.

[Paul] That's for me.

Nice.

(tranquil music) Okay, check this out.

This is shampoo ginger or Zingiber.

One of these things will give enough shampoo for a year for four people.

Oh.

Aw, yeah, that's amazing.

And I hate putting on suntan lotion and oily stuff like this, but this is amazing.

It just makes you feel so good.

Cleanses you entirely.

Aw, that's nice.

(mellow music) Yeah, well done.

I think you got it.

I'm gonna make the sauce for that.

If you get the sauce going, then I'll get the fritter going with the sauce over top of that as it is.

And then on the fritters both and see how it works out.

I've taken some raisins, we soaked them in a little bit of rum, dropped those in.

Flour.

(mellow music) (blender blending) How are things coming along?

We're getting that GBD talked about earlier.

Okay, well I'm ready with my sauce.

I'm ready to play with it, chef.

(mellow music) Yeah, do you know what, I'm just finding this, looked messy.

That wind has everything to do with that.

The wonderful thing about plating in an outdoor environment is sometimes the elements actually have an impact on what you're doing.

In this case, the wind came along just when we were getting ready for our final presentation, and it mucked it all up.

Ah we had to redo it, and I'd rather send it out right than send it out wrong.

Because after all, this is a showcase of some very special ingredients.

All right.

Ready?

Ready.

Shall we go find Les?

Some days are better than others.

Yeah.

The wind might of got us, but- Yeah, but you know what?

Still, the most important thing when it comes to food, is one word.

Delicious.

Delicious, that's right.

(mellow music) Is this, ah I'm guessing this is finger food.

[Paul] It's finger food.

[Camera man] Rum!

I'm guessing that's not apple juice.

[Paul] Ha ha.

[Ed] So here's what we did.

We took a little bit of chef's sauce and sweetened it.

So we have the chocolate, what we called the chocolate diablo, which is again, a play on mole.

Okay.

And then we took this nice Caribbean rum we have here, soaked some raisins in it, and added the raisins and coconut milk to make some coconut fritters.

So you have the coconut fritters to put it into the chocolate sauce.

And then again what you see is the raw coconut apple.

That was from the middle.

Okay, I'm doing a dip with the apples or the fritter first?

Either way, your choice.

Ah my fingers are all over this.

Let's go right to the, let's go, let's go to the one.

Here we go.

Go for it?

[Ed] Go for it.

[Paul] Go for it.

I gotta do that again.

[Les] That is- I mean, the sauce, the dipping is outstanding.

All right, let's go right to the fritter though, and see how that does.

So all right, I should stop myself though.

That was amazing.

So that coconut apple with this play on the mole sauce, yeah, I can eat that all night.

That's appetizer heaven or dessert heaven, whichever you wanna call it.

It's almost like an appetizer more than a dessert really, because it's got this spicy bite to it.

Here we go.

[Paul] I'm coming in.

I gotta try this.

Go for it.

Mmm, all right, I'm not sure what you guys are gonna get but here's what I get with this, right?

When you have a dipping dessert or appetizer, what I find in my brain, in my culinary mind, and my taste buds, it always comes down to, well, how much do you need the sauce, versus how much is just gonna be too much sauce, versus there's not enough sauce, right?

And it's not that often, honestly, that you get it right in the middle where you can go scoop, in, and go blend.

You guys have done this here.

These two things, this fritter and this coconut apple, in the bite size piece that I take with the amount I can get on it, I know this sounds all really like over the top and just how to dip something, but I gotta say, if I really wanna enjoy this dip I want to enjoy it, but I don't wanna overwhelm it.

One bite, one dip, perfect combination.

Well, I mean, and I also saw earlier that ah your dessert dish needed a repair, a quick repair on presentation.

I was sitting over there and I could see the frantic nature of what was going on.

But you know what?

We're on a boat.

You know.

The wind is blowing.

It picks up, it changes speed.

The boat's swinging around.

Now it's blowing, now it's not, now it's hot and sunny, now it's not.

So, I mean, I think, you know, we're just, we're on an adventure, right?

I mean, you know.

Diving that's one form of adventuring.

So is cycling, visiting ancient ruins, going on a safari.

The thing that adventuring does is it gives you perspective, a whole new perspective on life.

Adventuring takes you out of your comfort zone and into the wild harvest.

(upbeat music) If you'd like to continue the Wild Harvest with me and chef Paul Rogalski, then please check out our website at wildharvestfilms.com, where we have recipes and foraging tips along with deleted scenes and outtakes from the making of Les Stroud's Wild Harvest.

[Narrator] Directly inspired by the series, chef Paul and expert forger Les Stroud bring you the Wild Harvest season two recipe book, highlighting all of Paul's dishes and complete with behind the scenes stories.

It is available for $29.99.

In addition, a DVD of this season is also available for $19.99.

To order, please go to wildharvestfilms.com, Wild Harvest TV Show on Facebook, or Les Stroud's Wild Harvest on YouTube.

(mellow music) This program made possible by Forest River.

We have always been dedicated to helping people experience the joy of the outdoors by building a full range of recreational vehicles.

At Forest River, your needs, interest, and lifestyle are at the forefront of everything we do.

Forest River, follow the river.

To learn more, visit forestriver.tv.

(upbeat chiming)