Wild Food Foraging Trip in the Alps

You will need to arrange your own flights or train travel to France for this trip but we can help you to plan the best journey so feel free to ask for help. We will collect you from Gap train station at 17h.

We'll take you up to your accommodation in the Alps where your wild food foraging adventure will begin!

Meg, your chef at your accommodation will treat you to a delicious first meal created inline with the theme of wild foods. 

Please note, we can train delays of up to 1 hour, but any transfers requested outside of the scheduled transfer times will be at your charge and no refund will be given for your place on the missed transfer.

Today will be spent at altitude in and around the ski resort of Orcieres. Your local expert and chef for today, Stephane will take you for a walk up to the high altitude lake and Alpine fields to discover a wealth of plants, herbs and leaves growing in this sometimes inhospitable environment!

You may be familiar with some of the species like wild spinach, yarrow or nettles which can as easily be found growing in an English hedgerow as in the high Alps but other plants are more specialised growing only at altitude or preferring drier, sunnier climbs, like genepi or absinth plants.

You will each be armed with your bag or basket and a pair of scissors to pick and collect your selection from the array of possibilities.

You will then come back down to lunch at Stephane's restaurant and enjoy a local dish evolved over time from the knowledge of generations of farmers using the wild plants and produce available in the area.

The afternoon will be spent topping up your collection and then sorting and washing it ready to prepare a feuilleté of wild herbs that will form part of your evening menu tonight!

You will spend this morning lower in the valley where there is an abundance of fruits, berries and nuts to get excited about. Blackberries, walnuts, rose hip, rowan berries and elderberries are just some of the more common species you can expect to find but you may also discover sea-buckthorn berries, known locally as argousier, one of the local specialities of the area and abundant enough to be commercially exploited!

After tasting, smelling and picking our way through the morning, you will bring your carefully selected fruits, nuts and berries back up to Stephane's restaurant where your gastronomic taste buds will be stimulated by a tasting experience discovering the the many flavours of jams, jellies and confiture as well as ice creams that Stephane makes commercially from wild ingredients! 

The afternoon will be spent sorting and washing your berry assortment with a view to making a confiture that you can take home with you. 

The French are crazy about mushrooms and mushroom hunting is a national pass-time with families jealously guarding their preferred  locations from their neighbours!

As edible mushrooms are not always easy to tell apart from similar looking, toxic varieties, part of the qualification of a pharmacist in France is the ability to identify mushrooms and the general public can turn up at a pharmacists to verify their collection before cooking!

Today you will meet a local pharmacist and mushroom expert to guide you through the woods in search of edible mushrooms. After a picnic lunch out in the woods, you will bring your collection back to your accommodation where you will sort and wash them ready for Meg to turn into a gourmet mushroom fungi fest for dinner this evening.

Once the mushrooms are in Meg's capable hands, we will visit a local genepi distillery where you can see how these rare high altitude flowers, that you will have discovered over the week (not in flower but you will know of their existence!!) are transformed into a delicious aperitif or digestif! A tasting session is of course on the cards!

Today is the sad day we say goodbye :(

We will take you back down to the train station in Gap for 8h30am so please arrange your trains to coincide with this time.