Forest to Table: The Most Unique Asheville Food Tour

The forested mountains of western North Carolina are breathtakingly beautiful. My husband Michael and I learned that firsthand at our stay at The Swag resort, perched among the peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains. And the scenery continued to awe as we left The Swag and drove eastward to Asheville, the next stop on our cross-country road trip.

Of course we appreciate beautiful scenery, but let’s face it, with stops in New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston, South Carolina, this was a foodie road trip. So, in addition to stunning views, we were looking for an outstanding Asheville food tour.

The Asheville Food Scene

In the last two decades or so, Asheville, has earned a reputation as a top NC vacation destination. It’s a cool, bohemian city with, among other things, a creative craft brew scene, a vibrant arts district, and an eclectic, inviting restaurant culture, all in a setting interlaced with towering trees and surrounded by the forested hillsides visible from seemingly every corner in town.

We were eager to check out all of the above, and enjoy some of the famous foods of North Carolina, but we were also excited by the prospect of trying our hand at an aspect of foodie life we had yet to delve into: food foraging. The folks at No Taste Like Home had invited us to join them on a wild food foraging excursion 35 minutes outside of downtown. This sounded like the perfect Asheville food tour, so we responded with an enthusiastic “Absolutely!”

The meeting place to start our Asheville food tour

Before Our Food Foraging Tour

As we went to bed the night before our scheduled outing, we heard the beginnings of a wind-whipped rain slapping at the windows of our room. We hoped for the best: a rain that would exhaust itself overnight so that we could wake up to a sun-dappled morning ready to go foraging. It was not to be. When we got out of bed, rain and gray skies were waiting for us on the other side of our curtain. Hmm.

I checked my email and texts: no word that the Asheville foraging tour had been cancelled. We decided to bring our umbrellas, wear the closest things to rain gear that we had packed, and give it our best shot.

But as we headed to the meet-up point through a persistent drizzle, I thought of the advice a New-Age-leaning friend of mine once shared with me: When you’re nervous about a good outcome for something, simply ask aloud, “What would it take for _________?” and then fill in the blank with the positive outcome you’re hoping for. You don’t try to answer the question yourself, you just put it out there.

So, I looked out beyond the busy windshield wipers and asked, “What would it take for the rain to clear out and for us to have a wonderful, dry foraging tour today?” I finally convinced Mike to join in, and we laughed for the next 20 minutes as the rain paid no attention to us repeating our silly question. But about 5 minutes before our exit, the rain, inexplicably, gave up.

We arrived at the meeting point, a lovely garden complex and horticultural education center where the ground was damp but not soaked, with the sky actually showing smidges of blue interspersed among the clouds that no longer looked all that threatening. We left the umbrellas in the car.

The Most Unique Asheville Food Tour

We walked over to Cat, our guide-to-be, and her assistant. They were easy to identify: They had a pile of little baskets spread out on the ground in front of them. Soon we were all assembled: A group of foraging friends from Chicago, a young family from Ohio with two little girls, and a couple from Brooklyn. All of us but the Chicago crew were first-time food foragers.

Cat gave us a preview of the day. We would first walk through the garden area where we would spot some edibles hidden in full view, then we would hit the trail that wended through a thick patch of woods beyond the gardens. We’d search for edible food in the wild—flowers, leaves, and, of course, mushrooms.

Our Food Foraging Guide

Cat was wonderful. She was obviously enthusiastic about wild foraging, sharing with us how she used the practice to provide a good portion of her own diet, and how foraging was a way to stretch the sustainability of the local ecosystem. Farm to table is great, but forest to table has an even lighter footprint.

Cat was highly knowledgeable, friendly, informative, and fun. But she was also very serious about the risks of foraging for food with too little information. Nothing we came across was to be eaten unless Cat had either pointed it out to us herself or had personally checked anything we had discovered on our own.

Edible plant from our foraging tour in Asheville — Edible plants from our foraging tour in Asheville

Wild Food Foraging

Within minutes of getting started, we were eating off of the ground. In the underbrush below the cultivated flowers in one of the gardens, Cat pointed out the wild sheep sorrel, wood sorrel, and mountain mint growing.

We all gathered some and took some bites: lemony, somewhat different lemony, and—you guessed it—minty. We also found some fairy pickles: teeny berries shaped something like tiny pickles. They were tart, but fun to taste.

Next, Cat taught us how to spot sassafras leaves and sourwood leaves. We each then followed Cat’s recipe and wrapped the latter in the former and bit into our creation: a Blueridge Mountain fruit roll up! Unpredictably delightful!

Mushroom Foraging

Cat then transitioned to mushroom hunting and pointed out some wild chanterelle, leatherback milk cap, crown-tipped coral, and other edible mushrooms as she spotted them on our outing. We learned about the importance of identifying mushrooms properly and the serious risk involved in making mistakes.

After being introduced to at least a dozen other edibles along our continuing walk and taught what to look for to be able to spot them again, we broke up into groups and went wild food foraging on our own for 20 minutes. All of our finds were to be brought back to Cat and we would go through everything together to identify what was edible, what was maybe, and what was no way.

Mike and I concentrated on mushroom foraging and found lots. A number were chanterelles, which we could easily identify, but the majority were unknown to us. Most turned out to have some medicinal value but were not for the table.

Overall, the group brought back an impressive haul. Cat catalogued what was what, made piles of edibles for us to take home, and then chose an assortment of mushrooms and herbs and used her camping stove to prepare a lovely mushroom toast treat for us that we all enjoyed back at the gardens.

Mushroom toast made from foraged mushrooms — Our Asheville food tour ended with a snack made from our foraged mushrooms and herbs

Our Asheville Food Tour Continues

No Taste Like Home also has relationships with some wonderful restaurants in Asheville. Foragers are welcome to take home the finds that have passed their guide’s inspection and have those items incorporated into a free appetizer at one of the participating restaurants, provided that everyone at the table also orders an entrée off the menu.

We had arranged with Rhubarb, a real Asheville foodie favorite, to drop our ingredients off by 2:00 pm on the afternoon of our foraging tour so that we could have them incorporated into our dinner that evening.

Our Asheville Foodie Dinner

With the assortment of mushrooms and wild herbs we brought to Rhubarb, the kitchen made an amazing mushroom toast for our first course. Two totally wonderful but completely different mushroom toasts in the same day was a delicious new record for us! But that was just the start: The rest of the meal was amazing as well.

We followed up our foraged app with Lamb Ribs with Pilpelchuma Sauce, Wood Roasted Whole Sunburst Trout, and Grilled Pork Loin with Peach Chutney. What an incredible dinner! Our waitress was attentive and playful, and all the dishes were inventive, interesting, and absolutely scrumptious!

Appetizer made from edible plants and mushrooms from our foraging tour

Reflections On Our Asheville Food Tour

How fun to go on a great foraging outing in the day, learn about and sample a bunch of foods you would typically just pass by on an average hike, and then have a top-notch culinary crew at a local restaurant whip up a sensational creation you provided the foraged ingredients for?

We found the entire experience to be extremely informative, genuinely fun, a wonderful walk in the woods, and a homerun restaurant outing! I would jump at the chance to do this unique Asheville food tour again. What would it take?

Book your Asheville Foraging Tour with No Taste Like Home.