Listen to this article

Ever since I started foraging, I’ve been hearing occasionally about using burdock flower buds and thistle flower buds in place of artichoke to make wild artichoke dip. Several times I brought home some burdock thinking I’d try this. Life would get in the way, the burdock stems would dry out, or the buds would dry out, and I wouldn’t get to the experiment! But this past Monday (June 24), we were gathering some Canada Thistle, when the idea to get their tiny little flower buds to use in the experiment popped up, and we grabbed a bunch to bring home. I soaked them overnight so that they wouldn’t dry out on me before the next day’s efforts.

This morning, it took me 2 hours to chop the tiny buds away from their stems and into a medium-sized pot. I kept the stems and leaves to one side because we use those dried and crushed into teas and such. When the bag was finally chopped, I put the pot on to boil and boiled them for roughly 20 minutes. They are so small that it’s hard to test with a fork. Eventually I removed them from the heat and let them cool while I had lunch.

Most recipes for artichoke dip call for cream cheese, sour cream and/or mayonnaise. I opted for the cheese and mayo. I realized after I’d made this batch, that I could have added Poor Man’s pepper, or better known as Peppergrass in place of the Black Pepper and rewilded the recipe just a little bit more. I think I’ll do that in the next batch I make.

Canada Thistle Flower Bud Cheese Dip

Adapted from Cold Artichoke Dip recipes and using my homemade ricotta cheese sauce

Ingredients:

1.5ish cups of ricotta cheese sauce
2.5 cups Canada Thistle flower buds
5 tablespoons grated parmesan cheese
1 cup mayonnaise (or half cup each of sour cream and mayonnaise)
1 teaspoon of garlic powder or 1 clove or more to taste
sprinkle of salt
black pepper to taste

Instructions:

1. Gathering your thistle flower buds:
Using gloved hands and snips, snip off enough Canada thistle flower buds to fill roughly 1/4 to 1/3 of a regular-sized formerly plastic shipping bag.

1.a Preparing your thistle buds:
Bring the bag home, chop the buds from the stems. This will mean using a set of tongs in one hand, and a sharp knife in the other. I’m not a fast chopper, so this task took me roughly 2 hours to do.

1.b Rinse the buds, and place in pot. Cover with water, then bring to a boil. Artichoke recipes say to boil until fork tender. I cooked the buds on boil for roughly 15-20 minutes, then took them off the heat, drained, and set aside.

2. Make the ricotta cheese, then make it into a cheese sauce. Set aside. See notes below if you don’t have your own recipe for doing these steps.

3. Measure out the cooked buds to see how many cups you have. I ended up with 2.5 cups, so the recipe was adjusted accordingly. Measure to the closest half cup, you may have to round up slightly to reach that half cup.

4. Take the above measurements and adjust as necessary. For this recipe, examples were all at either 1.75 cups (a 14oz can) of artichoke, or 1.5 cups of artichoke. So I took the recipes and divided them by 3 to get a rough half cup recipe, then multiplied by 5 to get 5 times that much for 2.5 cups of cooked thistle buds.

5. In a medium-to-large blender cup, add all your ingredients listed above. Puree until most of your buds appear to have broken up in the dip. Not all of them will break up, but enough should that your dip may appear to have many little dark dots.

NOTE: If you’ve never made your own ricotta cheese before, do the following:

Home-made Ricotta Cheese:

Ingredients:

1 litre of half-in-half heavy cream
1/4 cup lemon juice concentrate
1 tspn salt

Instructions:

1. Pour the half ‘n half cream into a medium to large pot and turn on low. Begin stirring. Every few minutes, raise the temperature and continue stirring. When you’ve reached your stove’s high settings, place the food thermometer (I used a manual meat thermometer) into the pot, sitting on the edge so you can read it. Continue stirring until the thermometer reads 180F.

2. Remove from heat. Remove the thermometer.

3. Add the 1/4 cup lemon juice concentrate and stir. You should immediately see some curdling. Add the salt and stir again. Let sit for up to half an hour or more to cool somewhat.

4. In the meantime, get out a bowl almost the size of the pot, and some cheesecloth. I made my cheesecloth from old curtain sheers. Put two layers over the bowl.

5. When the pot has reached a cooler temperature, pour the curds and whey into the cheese cloth. Gather the corners and lift to drain out the whey. I use an inverted former metal dog bowl holder, where I’ve tied knots in the corners of the cheesecloth layers and I hook those corners over the former feet of the bowl holder. If necessary, I twist the corners before putting them over the feet, so there is a reasonable taughtness to the cloth.

6. After pouring the whey into the cloth and with your cloth now elevated either in your hand, on a hook, or like me, held aloft by an inverted metal dog bowl holder, let it drain for a few minutes. Gather the corners and twist the cheese cloth to squeeze out more of the whey. If the curds are too warm, get your tongs and while holding the cloth in one hand, twist it with the tongs to press out as much whey as you can.

When you can’t get anymore whey out, place the cloth on a surface and carefully reveal your ball of homemade ricotta cheese.