Yes, I made chocolate chip cookies using curly dock seed flour! Of course there was more to it than that, when you learn to cook with wild provisions, there’s always more to it.

The recipe I modified came from Detoxinista.

I don’t have coconut sugar in the house, so I used regular sugar. I thought about using one of our many wild syrups, but remembered that what I was about to do might not work well with that option, at least, not with what I had in mind.

As the original recipe called for buckwheat, and Curly Dock is a member of the Buckwheat family, I decided to see if I could make the cookies from curly dock seed flour.

Next up in the recipe changes was the vanilla extract. Now that we have Flower Essence of Arrowleaf Balsamroot in the house as our vanilla flavourant, I pulled that down out of the cupboard.

Up until a few days ago, that would have been it for shifting from domestic to wild, but we have FINALLY begun making Lamb’s Quarter’s Salt, as some call it, or culinary ash as others call it!

The salt experiment is simply to take the dried leaf and burn it. Simple instruction, not-so-simple to carry out! We bought a weed torch (roofing torch) earlier in late summer 2024, originally to act as the fuel source for a small BBQ Roku kiln, and it does well getting up to cone 06, sometimes all the way up to cone 04, and we are experimenting with making low-fired ceramics. We still have to work out the glazing recipe, but thanks to having this torch on hand, we decided to pull it out for the salt experiment this week.

We grabbed my stainless steel bucket I bought for the experiment and filled it half full. That would be the mistake! That half-bucket required stirring periodically, as the leaves would only burn down up to an inch at a time and literally no further! The leaves give off a gas that at one point, threatened to smother the torch’s flame! I was very glad we were doing this outside with plenty of ventilation around us!!! Just over an hour after we filled the bucket, the contents finally turned to a fine whitish-grey ash and we dumped it into another bucket to cool a bit. The next hour saw us only layering the bottom of the bucket, creating ash in 15 min increments. We sifted it into a large cookie tin, did our barn chores and came home, only having made a quarter bucket dent in the 25L storage pail. We have 3 of those to burn through. . .

For Ashley and myself, the flavour starts out salty, goes a bit bitter, then if you leave on the tongue long enough, the salty flavour comes back. For my son, who needs the salt far more than we do, the flavour is short-lived followed by the taste of “burnt” as he puts it. Searching around online for culinary ash shows others selling it at the same burn point we stopped at, so it is what it is, and it was time to start experimenting with it.

I wanted to do something in the way of baking, because salt use in our house is primarily in baking, or my son sprinkling it over his food, as it helps him with his cardiovascular issues. Yes, I know mainstream medical/nutritional advice says to go low-sodium/low-salt, but recent research as written about by Dr. Mercola and others, are validating my own use of salt to help my son, discovering that more salt, not less, is needed in the human diet. The issue is the type of salt. Standard table salt is empty and even carcinogenic, sea salt has become contaminated with micro-plastics, leaving rock salt as the only cost-effective alternative, unless one reaches for bamboo salt. When we learned about making plant-based salt from Lamb’s Quarters, and considering we were drowning in the stuff this summer, we all agreed it wouldn’t hurt to make the salt and see what we think of it. My son still needs to test the culinary ash on his food, but I went ahead with this cookie recipe.

It now looks like this:

Curly Dock Chocolate Chip Cookies

INGREDIENTS

1 cup curly dock seed flour
1/2 cup regular flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 cup rendered animal fat (melted)
8 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon Flower of Arrowleaf Balsamroot Glycerine Extract (vanilla flavour without the bean or artificial flavours)
1 teaspoon Lamb’s Quarter’s culinary ash (Pueblo Indians used it in their acidic dough for lift when baking)
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup dark chocolate chips

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Preheat the oven to 350ºF and line a large baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone mat.

2. In a large bowl, stir together the first 7 ingredients. Then add the vinegar, which will react with the culinary ash to help the cookies rise a bit. The dough will be crumbly, but should hold together after enough water has been added, you may have to experiment with that, go slow, two tablespoons at a time until you can gently knead it together into a soft ball.

3. Fold in the chocolate chips, then use a tablespoon to scoop the dough into 12 mounds spaced evenly apart on the lined baking sheet. I took each spoonful and rolled it around in one hand to make it roughly circular.

4. Flatten each cookie with your hands or back of the spoon, as these cookies will only spread slightly.

5. Bake until the edges are firm, at 350ºF this took roughly 20 minutes in my toaster oven. The original recipe took 10 minutes for the author. Let the cookies cool at least 10 minutes before serving.

Not having much of a sweet tooth, I found this recipe rather sweet, but tasted really nice. Ashley thought they tasted like chocolate chip maple cookies. This is because curly dock seed, when cooked, often exhibits a flavour strongly reminiscent of maple syrup.

This is a great recipe to have if you don’t or can’t have eggs in the house, don’t or can’t have milk in the house, and you still want a cookie! If you can’t have gluten either due to glyphosate sensitivities (such as chrohn’s or colitis), you can try the alternative flour the original author recommends in addition to the curly dock. The author also suggests that if you want to reduce the fat (something no longer recommended due to the body’s use of dietary fat to create the various hormones your body uses, nerve health, etc) you can replace a quarter cup of fat with apple sauce and reduce some of the water as well. I have made applesauce cake and cake muffins in the past, so I know this can work with regular flour, I haven’t tried it with wild flour yet.

Not having to rely on commercially-made salt or baking powder is on our horizon I have a feeling. I’ll know more as the experiments continue. But a big reason behind this hope, is that the mineral content will be both higher, and local to our area. In the same way you want local honey for your medicinal needs, and locally-grown food, you want locally-gown/sourced herbs and spices too. The food you eat from your area is far more beneficial than food grown half-way around the world!

I’ll be looking to add Lamb’s Quarters salt (culinary ash) to other baking recipes in the near future. I need to do some household baking this week and will be adding it in place of the salt in those recipes too.

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