Eating stinging nettles | Hacker News Reader

Eating stinging nettles

rachel.blog

242 pointsrzk217 comments

I grew up in Ukraine and stinging nettle soups were a popular part of our diet in the summers. It is delicious and I definitely don’t agree that it is bland. But I suspect a big part of it is what else you add to it. My suggestion is to look up “суп с крапивой” and use your favorite method of translating it to your language of choice to look at the variety of recipes.

I dunno man. A soup with “crap-ivoi”. Sounds sketchy.

You ate it in a hearty soup, likely made on pork bone broth, with a boiled egg, and sour cream added. It makes a lot of difference for culinary experience :) The other commenter probably just tried to add it to some rice, or as a "side green". On itself nettle is more or less like spinach, but with weaker taste

Axe head soup strikes again

I've always heard it as Stone Soup, but I presume it's the same thing.

I know it as Stone Porridge. These stories probably share an origin. https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/type1548.html is sitting in my browser bookmarks, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup has some variations not listed on that page.

In Sweden it is "Koka soppa på en spik". "Make soup with a (iron) nail".

We also eat nettle soup with a boiled egg-half. I would not call it bland, it is just a dish that does not scream with its loudest voice in your face.

I'd also like to add that I'd consider it a delicacy. Because it is pretty much the first vegetable that you can harvest in spring. And you don't have to have a garden, you can just go out and pick it from anywhere.

One of my all-time favorite stories.

My dear mother told me this story when I was just a boy. I was enchanted by the idea of this magical stone, too young to consider the clever trick the tramp was playing on the woman.

The sense of cooking being a magical endeavor has stayed with me ever since.

Hah I misinterpreted it a different way as a kid, for a long time I thought it was like a collective delusion where the shared experience of contributing insubstantial garnishes to a pot of water tricked everyone into finding it filling and enjoying it.

While that was the way it was taught to me as a kid, I thought it was more of a story about con men who came to a village and tricked the townsfolk to eat their entire winter rations in a grand feast and then skipped town before anyone realized what they did.

It wasn't a trick, the magic stone was a big salt rock. It was the most important ingredient from a flavor standpoint.

The key is to add lots of onions and garlic and some butter to give it base flavor. The nettles give off great colour and a more subtle flavor and of course add more nutrients.

The real key though is stinging nettles just simply grow like crazy in your backyard (at least in Ireland) so it's a two birds with the one stone kind of deal, you're gardening as well as cooking. There is also the 'badass' feeling of eating something that previously was dangerous. The heat will denature any stingers in the soup.

As a kid is somewhat rural western washington our backyard bordered on a many acred wood and just beyond our backyard fence was just a huge tangle of blackberry and nettles. As kids we'd get our dads machetes and carve a path into the woods proper every spring and every few years our family and the families on either side would spend a day trying to eradicate the encroaching blackberries to no ultimate avail.

We never ate the nettles, just had 1000 remedies for stings, but we did eat a lot of blackberry jam, cobblers and pies.

I'm in western washington and some people (not me) do eat the nettles. The blackberries are of course, delicious and well used. Always a good idea to pick above waist height of dogs. ;)

Or have small dogs.

These blackberries are everywhere so if you're walking down the road in season, you'll be able to snack on them (and you'll find lots of people stopping to harvest them).

Can't control the size of other people's dogs.

I was told as a child not to eat berries near roads due to being exposed to exhaust fumes, but never check if there is any science behind it.

There was, due to lead compounds in vehicle exhaust. Nasty stuff.

These days, tyre microplastics and diesel particulates are still a concern, but there's little hard science around the hazards of eating them in small quantities - there's microplastic in basically everything, to some degree, so you're not making it appreciably worse - and agricultural farm machinery is a worse diesel PM offender by far than a street's worth of modern cars.

Some commodity chocolate is dried out along the ride side, some heavy metal settling on from exhaust.

One would hope that more expensive chocolate would have a value chain to show that it’s been dried in a proper manner.

Nothing beats random sampling though.

I'm originally from W. WA. too, and I never heard about people eating them until I grew up.

I remember dreading them when we'd go through the ravines with friends to our hideouts. :D

Thank you for the correct google term to plug in! I do this all the time in Chinese, but have no idea where to start with other languages I don't speak.

I remember it as borsch with nettle. Nettle was one of the first green things in the spring, just after snow melted. Nettle borsch was cooked just like the regular one but with nettle instead of cabbage.

I'm also from around there. Another very effective flavor enhancer for pretty much any soup or stew or chowder is cold smoked pork. Ribs, pancetta, sausages...

It's also worth to mention that early spring sprouts do not sting at all. Cold "борщ" from them is delicious.

Stinging nettles taste good. They have a long history of human consumption. They're in a family of plants (Urticaceae) containing no other common food crops, so they increase variety of diet, which to me seems like a good idea. The main drawback is the bad texture. The stinging hairs have an unpleasant furry texture even after you cook them (which stops them from stinging but does not remove them). This is why they're traditionally served blended or finely chopped in soups. If somebody could breed a version without the stinging hairs (not merely inactivating them) I think they would make a good commercial crop.

We eat some thistles, which have basically the same issue - see artichokes. Gotta boil them to deactivate the needles, though I have no idea how the thistle and nettle needles compare biologically. Anyways, I guess my point is that it shouldn't be too hard to get Americans to eat these.

Every time I go out for hotpot, I get as many greens as possible; I love boiling them down in a tasty broth and chowing down on an entire football field of vegetables, sometimes wrapped around a piece of meat. I could see adding them in here easily.

There are also a lot of dishes you can add a big handful of chopped, frozen spinach to for some additional nutrition. These would be another incredible option in scenarios like that.

Blending it down to add a more herby flavor to a puree, or to bulk up a pesto, or something along those lines could work well.

You can scrape the needles off artichoke hearts, and you can buy them canned with the needles already removed. This isn't practical with stinging nettles.

I thought nettle stings were made of silica. Isn't that basically glass? How does water deactivate it?

I would assume it denatures the chemicals the sting delivers

On nettles, they're trichomes[1]. Probably somewhat similar to a skin tag? So it deactivates them by weakening the cell wall, just like when you cook the rest of the plant down.

>Both trichomes and root hairs [...] are lateral outgrowths of a single cell of the epidermal layer.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichome

The mineralization is just on the tips of the trichomes.

When dry they are irritating if rubbed against the skin but not stingy anymore and when boiled they have at most a sandy nature as the trichomes soften and can't penetrate as well.

It’s not uncommon to eat nettles in the PNW! I knew people who would fold the leaves a specific way to break the stingers off so you could eat the leaves raw even.

One delicious usage is blanching and then blending it into flour for green spaghetti.

Oh yeah my polish grandmother (100 and still kicking!) cooked some. Tastes like spinach and was great.

Fun story (semi related) she visited us in the US in 2015 and my sister served her kale. She amusingly said: “I haven’t had this since ww2” apparently when food was scarce they grew kale which was easy to grow in Poland and packed with nutrients

Yeah it's not as common here (Zurich) as the USA. Also, collard greens just don't seem to exist here.

My family in Belarus used to make a soup with it. Exactly like spinach, maybe more fibery texture.

Yes, my grandmother told me how the "Greek diet" was the one they ate while the Nazis tried to starve them out.

Funnily enough around a decade ago or so it was fashionable in some circles in Poland to eat kale and it brought all kinds of ridicule from people questioning the plant's purported benefits.

A lot of the more recent examples of Polish cuisine are dishes originally invented out of poverty and made largely out of cheap ingredients and which now took a new form using stuff unheard of at the time because the real recipe is not to contemporary taste.

My favourite example of that would be cold cheesecake - originally made largely from cottage cheese, nowadays has mascarpone as the main ingredient.

Mascarpone! Hardly anyone knew what mascarpone even was in the 70s.

> Mascarpone! Hardly anyone knew what mascarpone even was in the 70s.

Behind the Iron Curtain and no trade with the Decadent Bourgeoisie Westerners

"I came close to madness trying to find it here in the States but they just don't get the spices right."

When I read "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" when I was about 18, there is a mention of how in the summer they would get nettles in their gruel at the prison camp. Midwestern American me had no idea of the nutritive value of nettles and thought this was another layer of cruelty that the Soviet gulag heaped on its inmates. I had only encountered nettles on hikes in the woods, and held them in the same category as poison ivy.

Years later, dating the Finnish woman who is now my wife, I learned how to gather nettles, about nettle soup, and even that eating nettles can de-sensitize you to seasonal allergies. I had completely misinterpreted that part of Solzhenitsyn's writing, and that his point was that at least when the nettles were growing the gruel had some additional nutrition (like vitamin c) in it.

A lot of knowledge like this has been lost in suburban America.

In the 1930s American lawn care guides would tout volunteer herbs as a benefit of lawns. Today we call them "weeds" and spend a crazy amount of effort, money, and chemicals into eradicating them

If we had always had this attitude towards "weeds", we wouldn't have turned the weedy Brassica oleracea into cabbage, broccoli, kale, collard greens, etc.

lawns are a disaster from an environmental, cultural, and water-use sense.

In the 90s my dad turned into an organic lawn grower. He was always suspicious of Chemlawn but he used the standard recommended treatment of granulated fertilizer and herbicides. Then he had a revelation about root and soil health, and phosphorus pollution, and he never looked back. The result isn’t the “golf course” monoculture of his neighbors, but its good.

> and even that eating nettles can de-sensitize you to seasonal allergies.

Is there any research backing up this folk remedy? Asking for a partner and multiple family members with severe seasonal allergies

Some research suggests it works, some research concludes it is no better than placebo. :shrug:

Eh, good enough for me. Pretty sure placebo won't cut it with the severe allergy of my family members so we can just try and see.

(if it does have an effect then I wouldn't be surprised if it also matters if the nettles were regionally sourced or not - IIRC there were some studies suggesting that that mattered for the effectiveness of honey helping with seasonal allergies or not)

My SO swears raw milk helped for this. Sourced locally it contained local allergens and helped with seasonal allergies.

Mechanically it’s probably the same as allergy exposure therapy(https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/04/08/1168714...), which comes in a lot of varieties including oral/digestion.

It’s effective in a clinical setting and honestly too dangerous to recommend in home settings without several layers of precautions.

But, in theory, highly specialized exposures to particular local allergies would be more effective than most of the clinical studies. And that’s what I would expect is driving the folk remedy.

Worth noting, almost all of the treatments like this are VASTLY more effective when done at younger ages. But they are also even more dangerous. So please speak to an allergist first and don’t do stuff you just read online.

When I was growing up in eastern Europe in 80s, older folks in rural areas with various joint ailments would daily gather stinging nettles with gloves and then literally whip themselves on the affected places.

Maybe it was just natural suppressant of pain or anti-inflammatory remedy, certainly no expectation to fix joints themselves (that even current medicine often can't fix) but nobody normal would go through such experience daily if there would be results.

fwiw a lot of us are trying to bring that knowledge back. I'm currently in the process of replacing as much of my grass as possible with creeping thyme, because it's nice underfoot, smells good and doesn't need mowed.

>People think that when you become vegan you have to give up lots of food. It’s true that I stopped eating animals but the number of different species I eat has grown considerably. This is because meat-eaters tend to eat the same few species of animals over and over again – pigs, cows, chickens. Whereas there are some 20,000 species of edible plants in the world.

I was vegetarian for 10 years until around COVID. I often want to go back to vegetarianism, not for ethical or health reasons, just for the sheer diversity of what I ate and the fun of cooking with limitations.

I can't see how using plants diversely in cooking implies having to go full vegetarian.

The term you're looking for is "creative constraint". Some people (I am one of them) need the constraint enforced more brutally in order for it to work at all.

Sure, I could develop a minimalistic game using the Unity engine – but I find it much easier when I'm using the Pico-8 fantasy console to force myself to do so.

Similarly, I could cook a varied vegetable meal any day of the week – but I find it much easier when I'm using vegetarianism to force myself to do so.

It's why chip tunes are so great. Different constraints force people to rethink basic assumptions.

I have casually wondered what term to use to describe this phenomenon myself, and now I have it.

It’s why I like pixel art, chiptunes, polaroids, one-pot stews and modern video games for retro consoles among many other things. Sometimes I feel like this is why so many great artists come from restrictive religious backgrounds as well.

I eat meat twice a week. Every other day is vegetarian. Not on principle just by default.

That’s an interesting perspective, I found out something similar when travelling as a vegan.

The limitations put up forces you to go hunt for smaller, and sometimes fringe restaurants, located off the beaten path run by passionate people.

This is true. I’m not vegan or vegetarian, but I look for restaurants that cater to those audiences when traveling. It’s probably because they’re putting a lot more attention into the ingredients, which reflects as a more thoughtful end product.

We have a family policy when traveling to never eat anywhere we could frequent at home.

I enjoy exploring vegan restaurants all over the world too! I often avoid burgers because they are easy to make I guess, and I had a lot of them over 8 years of my vegan journey. I instead look for more unique menus so that I can learn things and replicate them at home. But traveling is the only time I allow myself some fish and dairy, or maybe some eggs, no meat at all though.

In the quote it sounds like they're conflating veganism and vegetarianism.

Nettle omelet

it's doubly perplexing since they cite stinging nettle risotto, a dish that started out as non vegan, and was born out of a community of meat eaters.

That's interesting. I tried vegetarianiam for a while and I found that it incredibly limiting and difficult.

I don't have the time to cook and ready-to-eat or frozen vegetarian meals just aren't a thing around here. I think if I went full veganism I'd starve.

As someone who became vegetarian after reading a Glenn Greenwald article I found on HN about how the pork industry does awful things and gets the government to prosecute people trying to expose it, the key I've found is to look to world cuisine.

Many cultures around the world have awesome food that's easily convertible to vegetarian or is vegetarian already, where meat might be a luxury.

Central America and the Caribbean have tons of dishes with rice, beans, plantains, and flavorful sauces with flatbreads. Or a million ways to prepare corn. West Africa has peanut stew that's amazing. Across the rest of the continent jollof rice and githeri are good solid bases for a meal. Misir wot is a spicy hearty lentil stew. North Africa has a rich vegetarian tradition of soups, stews, and rice dishes. In the middle east there's falafel, hummus, mujadara, shakshuka and about a million ways to combine spices, onions, tomatoes, flatbreads, etc. South Asia obviously has a massive vegetarian cultural tradition, as does Southeast and East Asia.

When I started, I found it hard. I kept thinking "beans and rice... I guess?" Once I started going, "ok, I'm going to pick a small region of the world and see what they eat there and try it" I had WAY more success. The first time I made tteok-bokki or sushi or vareniki I suddenly realized just how much of the world is really already preparing vegetarian meals for many of their meals.

as a pork lover, I'd say the sacrifices are well worth it

I don't understand your comment. Is it an attempt at humor? Don't be a dick.

I don't object to eating animals, I object to torturing animals in the process of raising them. You can raise pork without forcing mother pigs to indefinitely share a space with a pile of their rotting children's carcasses.

Ask yourself why it warrants a terrorism charge to smuggle out photos of animal mistreatment.

Read the article:

https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...

https://archive.is/kqBbh

Went ahead and looked up the article, wild:

> FBI agents are devoting substantial resources to a multistate hunt for two baby piglets that the bureau believes are named Lucy and Ethel. The two piglets were removed over the summer from the Circle Four Farm in Utah by animal rights activists who had entered the Smithfield Foods-owned factory farm to film the brutal, torturous conditions in which the pigs are bred in order to be slaughtered.

> Rather than leave the two piglets at Circle Four Farm to wait for an imminent and painful death, the DxE activists decided to rescue them. They carried them out of the pens where they had been suffering and took them to an animal sanctuary to be treated and nursed back to health.

Your tax Dollars at work!

ICE is currently shooting peaceful protestors and is gearing up for war with Venezuela; a couple of pigs chasing a couple of pigs is the least of my concerns viz-a-viz tax dollars

Sorta. The animal welfare laws say that getting images out of food production facilities are terrorism. Which suggests that an authoritarian regime could/would deploy a lot more of the state power against them.

And I think "understanding your food sources is terrorism" has impacts too people should be worried about. (To be clear, they ARE less acute than ICE concerns, of course).

Thanks for your response. But I think you've misunderstood.

I'm pretty well aware of the deep well of cuisines offered by various cultures, but my issue is not finding recipes -- it's the time I and effort spend cooking.

My current job takes a lot of time and energy out of me, by the time I get home I'm pretty exhausted. I don't really get any time to cook throughout the week. (Which kinda sucks, I did enjoy cooking)

I rely a lot on quick meals from Trader Joe's or something I can just toss in the microwave. And while Trader Joe's does have some vegan/vegetarian selections like that, it's kinda limited.

I don't know Trader Joe and what they offer but here's some quick preps I found convenient:

- cereals and lentils/beans semolina. Mix with oil, spices and hot water. Cover and wait 5 minutes.

- Cans of beans, lentils, chickpeas mixed with pre-made tabbouleh or another carb. Oil/spice and eat.

- Various marinated tofu: they're delicious own they own and don't need prep: open and bite.

- Instant mashed lentils/slip peas/quinoa (flakes). Oil/spice/water and eat.

- Tempeh: microwave and dip in sauce.

- bread and houmous.

- bread and nuts.

- Vegetable that can be eaten raw: rince and eat. Dip in sauces if you like. Carrots, cauliflower, cucumber, radishes, chicory, small iceberg salads...

- Fruits. rince and eat.

The trick is to have a few different oils and spices, those add taste and nutrients. Also you can add to anything a spoon of brewer's yeast if you're into that (cheese/fermented taste) or of silken tofu for more creamyness.

Apparently some of the nettle family have edible berries.

Jared Rydelek's channel is about eating exotic fruits. It's a bit long winded but pretty neat to see the unusual fruits from around the world.

A recent video has him eating a berry from the Gympie gympie/stinging tree/Dendrocnide moroides from the nettle family.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aEio_yDEc8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides

I've been watching weird explorer for years and I had never considered I didn't know his name. I had _no_ idea he's caled Jared Rydelek!

His videos are incredibly interesting and fascinating

I know I'm subscribed to the right channels when I come to HN to post a (rather obscure) YT link and someone's beaten me to it!

OK, that's hardcore. For the non-Australians in the audience, the gympie-gympie is notorious as one of the most dangerous plants in the world, stings are incredibly painful and can last for up to a year. You can get sick even from being in the general vicinity and inhaling the hairs.

In my childhood in Greece, stinging nettle pie (τσουκνιδόπιτα), a dish much like spinach pie, was a traditional recipe often prepared by grandmothers. Today, younger generations may not even recognize stinging nettle, though it once held a valued place in our culinary heritage.

Similarly in Romania, though it is not a pie, "Mancare de Urzici" some kidn of mash, young nettles are boiled, puréed and cooked into a sort of spinach-like mash. I remember my grandmother preparing this quite often during the warm months.

Sounds a lot like "Stoemp", from Belgium. Spinach and carrot are classic, but any veggie works. Funny how very similar dishes can be found across the world under different names.

I think this is is still somewhat common, though it's definitely a home-only meal. You still find fresh nettles for sale in markets in Bucharest every spring. I for one hate the smell and taste, but my parents and grandma eat some every year.

My Bosnian grandmother used to collect stinging nettles from our garden and make burek with it. I remember that it was even more delicious than her spinach burek.

Anyone that doesn't recognize stinging nettle soon will, after coming in contact with it.

same in Italy, it was common when I was younger my grandma made fritters with nettles, ground ham, breadcrumbs and eggs and we would eat them cold as a snack in the summer

We love our horta in Greece. And not only when we're in Greece :)

https://youtu.be/Vk32lDLmQhc?si=5qP2-hV6Xe_i3gUh

I've tried various stinging nettle dishes. For me, they fall into the long list of things that are technically edible, but I see no reason why one would eat them today aside from cultural history/connection/tradition reasons. Every way I've tried them, they basically just taste like plant.

If you like it, great, but I think the value to those who don't have some pre-existing reason to be interested in the dish to be overstated. Similar plants in the category are miner's lettuce and dandelion greens.

If one has a great abundance of it, and one likes to spend time preparing ones own food, or if the idea of wild gathered plants has special appeal, then nettles (etc.) can indeed take the place (ish) of things like lettuce and spinach, but don't expect some dramatically unique experience.

You eat them because they are abundant and nutritious. I can't gather wild arugula where I live, but there is plenty of Nettles.

"just taste like plant" the same can be said of Matcha which tastes like eating grass.

I have no pre-existing reason, I just like the way nettles taste. Though since we have eaten them for a long while, they are available in bags in the grocery store every summer, which makes the whole thing a lot easier.

I've had them. They're fine. But this is overselling the variety angle. The meat eater equivalence of forage like this would be game animals. In my experience and extrapolating, the taste difference between game and farm animals is generally greater than among the green vegetables.

Not sure I agree, I think there's as much difference between spinach, leek, fennel and Brussels sprouts as between beef and deer and that's without foraging into fancy vegetables...

Of those four, only really spinach would be considered "greens" I think.

Ah interesting, I thought greens were all green vegetables. It's a bit of a moot point though, since the blog post is about edible plants in general.

Sure, but spinach, kale, mustard greens, chard, and arugula are all pretty wildly different. With different textures, flavors, and other things going on.

Blanched as a pizza topping is one of the ways we like to eat them.

I'd disagree that they're bland. Are they more towards the bland end of the scale than mustard greens or something, sure, but they're definitely not tasteless.

I love them in pizza, I don't think we even blanche them, cook them Napolitan-style on a very hot oven quickly. Definitely tasty.

Also works as a pesto ingredient

For those reading this and wanting to pick nettle, it is important to pick young leaves, and not from plants that are in flower.

Once the leaves are older, there are all sorts of oxalates, and you should really avoid them if you are sensitive to kidney stones.

These plants also absorb pollution very effectively, so keep in mind where you pick them from.

>Once the leaves are older, there are all sorts of oxalates, and you should really avoid them if you are sensitive to kidney stones.

I've heard this before but I've never seen reliable evidence for it. I searched PubMed for "Urtica dioica oxalate" and found this study:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23009884/

The full text is paywalled, but from the abstract:

"Four examples of typical wild edible plants were evaluated (stinging nettle, sorrel, chickweed and common lambsquarters), and based on substantial equivalence with known food plants the majority of the bioactive components reported were within the range experienced when eating or drinking typical food stuffs. For most compounds the hazards could be evaluated as minor. The only precaution found was for common lambsquarters because of its presumed high level of oxalic acid."

There are also several animal studies suggesting a potential protective effect of stinging nettles against kidney stone.

Oxalic acid is a component of the toxin injected by the stinging hairs, but this is removed by cooking.

It's possible that there's confusion because older stinging nettle leaves grow cystoliths (hard mineral deposits in the leaves). Cystoliths are usually calcium carbonate. I'm not aware of any plant that produces oxalate salt cystoliths. If anybody has some hard evidence for the composition of stinging nettle cystoliths I'd like to see it, even though I personally only pick stinging nettles when they're in season and the leaves are still young.

Stinging nettles are often touted as free abundant superfood, but the truth is it is rather bland and boring. Yes, edible, but you would be better of grabbing some established greens from a local grocery store.

> superfood

Most superfoods are what we ate when we were poor growing up. Nettles, collards, mustard greens, kale...

My opinion, the word superfood, gets people to pay a premium for cheap and easily commercially grown plants.

That's awesome they gave you greens. All I seemed to get were bricks of moldy cheese, dried milk and occasional bread and mayo sandwiches.

Tell me you had a single mother who got WIC without telling me directly.

funny, did you come up with that one yourself?

Honest question, what was your intent with your reply?

the whole "tell me your x without telling me your x" is tedious. its not half as witty as it feels

They were actually correct, though. I thought it was funny. There were a lot of us back in the day especially in the rust belt.

> bricks of moldy cheese

That's the good stuff!?

Kale has entered the chat.

Yeah, these are usually only eaten right around Easter.

And right before morel mushrooms are harvested.

Are other greens really much more tasty? Either way, many superfoods are not eaten solo - you can mix with basil for a lovely pesto for example, or simply add some nettle to your normal stew/soup for added nutrients.

I have nettle tea every morning and now thinking about the standard black tea, I see that as "bland/boring". I admit it didn't appeal at first, but now I love the earthy taste, so maybe it's slightly acquired taste?

I've always liked nettle tea, but perhaps that's because I grew up with it. I also "invented" catnip tea. Yes, I know, everybody knows about catnip tea. But as I kid I didn't, and I noticed that catnip and nettles often were growing together wild on our farm. I suspected the catnip had evolved to hide in the nettles, because it looks very similar to it. Don't know if that's true or if it was just because they liked similar conditions. But, since I was often taking the nettles for tea, I figured I'd try the catnip. It was good.

Interesting - never tried catnip tea, so if I see some, i'll give it a try!

As a cyclist occasionally brushing against stinging nettles when the city can’t clear them fast enough after a growth season, I do applaud everyone picking and eating as much as they can carry :)

Young ones can readily replace spinach

This is not clarified on the blog, and is an important point. The mature plant is not tender or tasty.

In Eastern European countryside a hundred years ago, nettles used to be the last resort in early spring when winter supplies were growing thin, and anything growing and not poisonous would be cooked. Sure, they have some nutritional value, but there are reasons why they're not really eaten nowadays...

I thinks is mostly a matter of effort, not just taste. I'm Italian and my grandma used to forage dozens of wild plants, some very tasty (not nettles, I'd agree), and I still forage a few.

But it takes a morning to have the equivalent of 5 minutes in the vegetable isle of the supermarket.

From the comments, it looks like eating stinging nettles is quite common throughout Europe. It is definitely well-known in Denmark, and used in a number of recipes. You can buy dried and chopped stinging nettles, but they are best when you pick them fresh. The classic Danish recipe is "brændenældesuppe" (stinging nettle soup). I dont think it is as common as it used to be, as our food culture has been so americanized.

They're best when picked fresh and young, i.e. easiest to collect in spring, it's kind of spinachy but with more texture. A bechamel base from butter, flour and broth or cream is all that's needed to make a good soup from chopped nettles.

> This is because meat-eaters tend to eat the same few species of animals over and over again – pigs, cows, chickens.

Tangential, but this is one of the things I like about eating fish. There are so many species you can eat, some of which you can only find in certain regions or have to catch yourself. My list of aquatic animals I've eaten has 47 entries on it and I've surely missed some because it's often hard to tell exactly what species you're getting at a restaurant. I'm always excited to add more to the list.

Some less common ones I've had are sickle pomfret ("monchong") and moonfish ("opah") from a fish market in Hawaii, cobia from a fishing trip in Florida, and many perch and bluegill that I've caught myself.

In the Netherlands it's quite common to eat stinging nettle cheese. It's quite tasty. Fenugreek is another crowd favourite.

Over here (England) we have Cornish Yarg that is cheese wrapped in nettles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_Yarg

Apparently it's possible to make nettle rennet for coagulating milk into cheese, though it's not recommended for making aged cheeses.

Back in the early '80s we ate a lot of English nettle cheese that we bought in the Dekalb Farmers Market in Atlanta. It was delicious. I've watched but never found it in the US since.

It looked like this: https://www.northumberlandcheese.co.uk/nettle-cheese

Wasn't expensive.

I live about five minutes by car from that shop. Weird when that happens on HN.

"Shop"? Ok, well, have you ever been in there? Because it might be the best market in Atlanta, right now.

We just spent a 3 year sojourn in the Atlanta metro area and the Dekalb Farmers Market is one of the only things we will miss. Still the best reasonably priced beautiful cheese/dairy/seafood/charcuterie + a whole bunch of other stuff in N. Georgia.

Now we're back West again and there is Lee Lee Oriental Market. No interesting cheese, but a lot of other things. Including charcuterie!

If you go to the Dekalb Farmer's Market definitely look for nettle cheese.

I think that by "shop" OP meant the actual British producer of said cheese.

yes by "shop" I did mean the place in Blagdon, Northumberland. I live right next to it two small towns down.

Relatively common in Finland to use young nettles like you’d use spinach in hot dishes (soup, blanched, pancakes).

> pancakes

Is this a frittata-style baked pancake? I've made rye pannukakku from the family cookbook here in the US Midwest but never seen any Finnish pancake with spinach or nettle.

Not quite. You take Finnish pancake batter (unleavened, a bit thicker than French crepes) and add blanched, finely chopped spinach or nettles.

https://scandicuisine.com/stinging-nettle-pancakes/ looks quite reasonable though most Finns would not use a blender for this.

There's a restaurant in Sarajevo which specializes in this stuff, called The Singing Nettle. Recommended.

In my country soups made from stinging nettles have been eaten most likely for thousands of years. It tastes a lot like spinach and is full of vitamin C and such.

This is a staple food in Romania during spring. With or without rice. Great with fried eggs.

> "nutritious source of iron, calcium, potassium, and silica"

Hold up, is silica (SiO₂) supposed to be a nutrient? That's a striking sentence.

Yes, silica deficiency may cause bone deformities.

I think it's also involved in collagen formation? There is an herb (horsetail herb) that allegedly helps with bone remineralization/regrowth as well as hair/skin/nail growth and it is loaded with silica. (Beware it also contains thiaminase, which can deplete vitamin B1. Some supplements contain B1 to compensate but it is mostly taken as a tea).

In Germany, cheese with stinging nettle is a thing and I remember eating it a few times as a child (Brennnesselkäse), typically Gouda-like types.

In the spring I get nettles and wild garlic and a bit later elderflower. Summer is berries (including elderberries), plums, wild cherries (not as good as they sound). Fall is wild mushrooms and sloe and monkey butt fruit and persimmons, apple, pear, etc. Winter is drinking elderflower vodka and sloe gin and eating frozen and dried stuff from the rest of the year. I'm sure I'm forgetting things.

Foraging is definitely a fun hobby, and not limited to vegetarians/vegans.

I haven't tried nettles yet, mostly because people say it's bland and there's so much else to choose from. In particular, nettle season is also meadowsweet season, and that is incredibly good. It's in the same taste family as vanilla, almond and cinnamon but it's its own unique thing.

No dandelion? I can't recommend it enough.

About every part is edible too: new leaves are sweet, old leaves are bitter, buds can be pickled, roots you can make teas and coffee substitute.

A few related plants are also good (e.g. wild chicory), and it's one of the easiest plants to identify.

There is also ‘nettle beer’, dunno if my batch failed but it was undrinkable

Nettle tea's nice, from what I remember. Use the young tips of the plants.

I can second this, add just a tiny bit sugar and it is delicious

Thirding. Extremely wholesome and warming. I need to get some more of that it has been a while.

My batches turn out excellent. Some tips, if you'd like to try again:

- Harvest the younger leaves, remove the stems.

- Harvest before they go to seed, or remove all seeds.

- Make a tea from the leaves by soaking in hot water. Do not let the water boil or simmer with the leaves!

- Add a healthy portion of lemon juice. I'll use 1/2 to 1 cup for a 20L batch.

- Use brewing sugar, or invert your sugar.

- Choose a yeast that doesn't impart too much of its own flavour (I like ale yeasts, like for ciders).

  For me, the choice of yeast was key.

Thanks! I def. did not pay attention to the younger leaves parts. I remember using a coder yeast. The dish described in OP was fine btw!

I first tried nettle soup in Bulgaria. So delicious. FYI you can replace spinach with nettle in almost any recipe and vise versa.

Random fact:

You only get stung by nettles around the edge of their leaves. You can touch the middle of the leaf and you won't get stung.

their stalks also sting

is this a trap :D

If you live by nettle you’ll should learn to identify plantago (plantain) and yarrow. Both are used for herbal poultices and grow in the same biomes. Grab one, bruise it a bit and rub it on the insulted area.

Another thing my dad demonstrated to me a few weeks ago: you can grab a nettle by the base, move your hand upward, and as the nettle is sliding through your closed hand, it won't sting at all. This is because the sting cells are oriented perpendicular to the surface of the plant (or pointed slightly upward) so their pointy end doesn't come in contact with the skin at an angle where it would penetrate the skin.

Queen Anne’s lace is sort of the same way. When I grab it to pull it, I do it fingertips first, then roll my fingers and palms down onto the stalk which flattens the hairs due to the angle.

Works on a few types of thistle with small thorns but a stick works better.

The grippy skin on your hands is also often thick enough on its own to protect you, especially when callused, same for bare feet (so you can pinch them without getting stung).

The problem is all the thin skin (ankles, wrists, lower leg/arm) that you are very likely to graze them with.

I can testify that steamed stingy nettles with gomasio (toasted sesame seeds and salt) is very delicious.

100% thought this would be about eating jellyfish (which I'm completely on board with because they've stung me upwards of a dozen times and that old Klingon proverb that says that revenge, much like jellyfish, is a dish best served cold).

Apropos of stinging plants though both of my parents are supposedly very allergic to poison ivy. I maintained an immunity to it until I was around 27-28 when it began to affect me very slightly. Now if I graze it I can get away without ill effects merely by washing the urushiol off with dish soap within a half hour or so. I've heard of gardeners and outdoorspeople eating it in small quantities to maintain their resistance to it. While I'm not particularly keen to try this there is something poetic about it.

I have severe food allergies and have used desensitization to expand what I can eat. It can take months and occasionally backfires, but it works.

Subsequent exposure to poison ivy definitely increases, not decreases, the reaction, at least in my family's genes.

My dad got exposed a few times in a row and had to stop eating cashews (same plant family) for awhile.

> eating it in small quantities

Risking your throat closing up seems Darwinian.

People don't usually have an Epipen within reach?

Eh, jellyfish isn't really any good. For the money, there's many better things to eat. I should admit I've only had it the once, but that's enough for me.

I had ortie pasta (nettle in French) once when I lived in France. Then I started seeing ortie products all over, usually in a fancy bio corner in supermarkets. I suppose it is common in Europe, reading other comments?

It can help improve Testosterone processing. If you are showing male pattern hair thinning try a Stinging Nettle Extract, and get a medical workup.

Animal research reveals that this powerful plant may prevent the conversion of testosterone into dihydrotestosterone — a more powerful form of testosterone (12Trusted Source).

Stopping this conversion can help reduce prostate size.

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/stinging-nettle#TOC_TIT...

A link to the relevant paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21806658/ [Ameliorative effects of stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) on testosterone-induced prostatic hyperplasia in rats]

Nettles have a lot of uses. Back in the day my grandfather's neighbour would, whenever he was getting sick, take off all his clothes and roll around in the nettles. I've got no idea why - he kept doing it so it must've done something for him. It could've been an old folk remedy, but I can imagine the pain would distract you from the sickness.

I had severe back pain, got some major bronchial stuff going on, for 5 weeks - I'm getting better from that, as my back is beginning to hurt again.

They were common in the mountains of Southern California. In Scouts, we would eat them, make twine, and even use them for toilet paper :D

Nettle soup is one of the things I miss most about living in Sweden. Also, I'm surprised to hear that silica is a nutrient!?

Milarepa's skin and hair supposedly turned green from living on nettles for a while while meditating in retreat.

https://buddhaweekly.com/milarepa-explains-happiness-story-n...

I enjoyed the humorous back and forth in the middle. “What about meat?” “Nettles” “Grain?” “Nettles” “Seasoning?” “Also nettles.”

Just make sure not to pick them from fertilized ground (like garden beds) as they may have high levels of nitrites (?).

Pick them from wild areas

I don't know about going vegetarian but they are probably the best tasting leaf vegetable.

I prefer them raw.

The stalks also produce fiber that is long and strong - almost as good as flax/linen.

The plant is very easy to grow because it spreads both by rhizomes and by seed although that means you have to be on top of it in order to control its spread.

https://archive.org/details/foraging-wild-edible-plants-of-n...

Stinging nettles are quite popular in Romania. We make a puree and we eat them with eggs and polenta.

I grow stinging nettles. I used to just steam them for 10 or so minutes. Then they're a normal green. Can mix with eggs, eat plain on the side, add some salt.

Pretty good stuff.

If you do grow them, make sure you situate them in a corner of the yard--no fun to get stung.

I eat them fairly often, but tend to get "nettle fatigue" quite early on due to their strong fishy smell - ammonia-like. Anyone got a recipe / way of getting past it, or masking it efficiently?

I also use it for tea regularly in Spring/Summer. Once they're seeding I use the seeds for tea. If I have enough time to collect them I'll store the seeds for a garnish over winter.

The most appealing vegetable foraging to me has been Japanese these fiddle-leaf looking things, also these tree nubs that is like asparagus and a huge strawberry leaf that gets deep fried

Fiddleheads? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddlehead

yeah that's right, the asparagus I was thinking of is called bracken

I gotta find this guy's videos I follow he's actually Japanese/lives in the woods

My grandma used to make stinging nettle soup a lot (I think a Swedish thing) - it tasted great, mostly like spinach and vegetable stock! Always feel nostalgic whenever I see it anywhere.

We used to have nettle salad as a kid. IIRC if you cut them fine enough, they stop stinging or something like that. Can’t quite remember, so maybe DYOR before you make a salad ;)

I love making nettle tea over a campfire. Drink the tea, then eat the nettles. It tastes very nourishing. Bagged nettle tea doesn’t come close. (Northeastern USA.)

Not to alarm anyone; SN was used to discipline kids who misbehaved while growing up

dip the the plant in water and that whip the back kids with it. yeah, horrible i know.

My mom likes stinging nettle soup, she used to make it occasionally when I was a child. I didn’t like it back then, no idea if I would like it now.

Milarepa (famous Indian saint) lived on nettle soup for a while (while living in a cave and such). Turned him green. Neighbors were freaked out.

My neighbor uses the stinging nettles out of my yard to make an amazing risotto. Every spring there’s a part of my yard that gets covered with them.

You can also make nettle tea. It tastes kinda earthy and has a nice smell. You can add other things to it, like mint or raspberry leaves.

My mom made soup from them when I grew up. They are not particularly special taste-wise but I can believe they have vitamins, like every green.

I confirm, it’s good! I’m from a northern region of Italy where you can even find risotto with ortiche (stinging nettles) in restaurants.

Ate a lot of nettle soup growing up. I'd say it tastes a lot like spinach. It's also nice to put a little milk (sorry vegans)

No need to apologise, oat/almond milk very easily available (or made in a blender as I do!)

I'm curious why they are beneficial for rheumatoid arthritis diseases and how to prepare them for that purpose.

My godfather’s wife made this. They were from Waloonia.

I was surprised the first time I saw her making it but it was creamy, tasty.

Stinging nettles are probably my favorite condiment, you sure don't need to be vegan to appreciate them

My mom often made nettle soup from nettles in our garden. They grow quite endemic here in Belgium.

There's not much to this blogpost. Do most people not realise that nettles are edible?

Yes.

10,000 xkcd.

When people mention nettles, they also mention dandelions too. Both are good sources of nutrients

As an aside, dandelion and burdock may very well be the best soda in the world, so delicious, and sadly quite difficult to source outside of the UK.

Possibly worth trying root beer (sassafras) or sarsaparilla if you go to the USA. Not quite the same, but similar in flavour.

Ha, you know me well random stranger. :) Root beer is tied with dandelion and burdock as my fav soda.

Nettles & fresh jalapeño salad with mayo-miso dressing is one of my favorite inventions.

Had nettle tea from Sweden, didn't think about it twice, very nice.

Great way to 'other' a group of folks who don't tend to stick to an all veggie diet. It wasn't enough just to say you can eat nettles and they're ok, but they had to take a dump on meat eating while they're at it

you don't have to take it personally. vegan food is entirely a subset of food that nonvegans can eat.

They make a nice tea.

Agreed. I can only get dried nettle leaf tea here, although seems to be going out of fashion, same with Ginkgo.

I got spoilt for teas when I was contracting in Germany. Nettle was very common along with some other traditional teas, including one that was good for flu/fever that I can never remember.

The loose leaves are for sale at my food co-op, but many years I go out and harvest them from nettles I see on the roadsides.

Pretty popular all over Europe. Also used for tea.

Why the hate on the alcachofas?

2018

> People think that when you become vegan you have to give up lots of food

Well, that’s kind of the point no? You do.

I think they mean people imagine you’d give up on variety of food.

Which you also do… if we’re really being honest about it.

Is Dock Leaf soup good?

See also the Nettle Eating World Championships; no boiling allowed there though. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6152l8z20o

Reply on news.ycombinator.com