Tastes of herbs with Rosalee de la Forêt

Taste of Herbs with Rosalee de la Forêt
Rosalee: They say that a picture says a thousand words, that's kind of same with tastes, you know, a taste can equate thousands and thousands of words. I think if it is like the difference of you could read about an apple all day long, you can read the history of the apple. You could read about the energetics of the apple. You could read about the constituents. You could read about its color. You could even hear descriptions of how an apple might taste, but you never really know an apple until you actually taste it.
However we can actually taste and feel and experience herbs that's how they really come to life. And then that knowledge is yours forever. It's not something you're going to readily forget. It's not something you're going to have to say like, Oh, well, so, and so said, so I'll just repeat that now. It's something you really get to own. And I think there's just something so empowering about that and there becomes this deeper and deeper relationship between you and the plants.
Lana: You're listening to Plant Love Radio episode number 69.
Lana: Hello friends. How was your week? When I began studying herbal medicine, I enjoyed and appreciate the complexity of this science. But as I started experimenting and applying different preparations in my own life, everything shifted for me.
I learned how important it is to rely on your own senses and not just on the words written in textbooks. About seven or eight years ago, I took a fun course taught by an herbalist I admire and respect Rosalee de la Forêt that helped me to appreciate this change in my own perspective even more.
Every fall Rosalee opens the doors to this flagship course, Tastes of Herbs to invite new students explore how they can simplify herbal medicine in their own lives and understand best ways of applying the concepts.
Rosalee loves to inspire people to connect with nature and herbs in their everyday life. She's the best selling author of two wonderful books - Alchemy of herbs: Transform everyday ingredients into foods and remedies that heal and Wild remedies: How to forage healing foods and craft your own medicine.
Rosalee is the education director for LearningHerbs and author of several great online courses, including Herbal cold care, Apothecary and of course the Taste of herbs. Rosalee is a registered herbalist with the American Herbalist Guild.
In today's conversation we discussed, why taste is so important and what makes it so useful for learning herbal medicine. We'll talk about unique characteristics of each taste and how you can learn herbal medicine through various recipes.
This is my third interview with Rosalee and each time she generously offers special bonuses and materials for the listeners of Plant Love Radio. Today's no different. As a listener of this podcast, you can get Rosalee's three wonderful recipes, Cardamom and chia seed pudding, Rose petal vinegar, and Adaptogens bon bons. To get these and to explore resources recommended in today's episode, please head over to the show notes at https://plantlovelradio.com/69. Enjoy!
Interview
Lana: Rosalee, good afternoon. How are you?
Rosalee: I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me again, Lana.
Lana: Today we will be exploring a topic that is near and dear to your heart tastes of herbs. But before we begin, for those listeners who have not met you yet, could you please tell us a little bit about yourself?
Getting to know Rosalee
Rosalee: Sure. Well, I am an herbalist. I live in North Central Cascades of Washington state. I live on 20 acres. I can't see my neighbors. but they're out there. I live in this really beautiful kind of in the foothills of mountains, I live in a Valley. And it's really wild and beautiful here. And I started studying herbs in my early twenties, and I just got drawn to it by various ways and went to this school, went to that school and loved every moment of it.
And I just was a sponge soaking it all up as best as I could. But back in those days, I was really focused on memorizing information. Yeah. I'm a pretty good memorizer. So it worked out for me. I did things like flashcards and trying to remember names of herbal actions and I did a lot of record keeping with plants. And a lot of rote memorization.
And after several years, I started working with clients. It just kind of happen naturally. I think this happens to a lot of people, you're talking about herbs, you're working with herbs and then suddenly people start coming and saying, Hey, I'm having this issue. Can herbs help? Would you work with me on that?
So I started working with people. Which brought on new and exciting challenges and rewards. And it was through that process of working with people one on one that I really started to put the herbs to work and it wasn't just seeing the results I got, but it was seeing results with different people.
And what I quickly saw was that sometimes the herbs worked really well and it was easy win. Yay. We did it. Everyone's happy. It was kind of a head scratcher, like, yeah, this is not really working or, the things that had worked in someone else just like weren't working the same for this person.
And I was definitely wondering about that. And it was a challenge for me cause I wanted to feel confident and able to help people. And I just felt like I was missing something It was through that process, that I heard an interview with Leslie Tierra actually from East West school of herbology and she was talking about energetics.
And I thought that term kind of sounded funny to my ears. You know, I didn't really understand it, but she started talking about things that made so much sense and she started to discussing this whole other way of looking at herbs, other than, if you have a headache, take this herb, or if you have a rash, take this herb. It was this whole other world that just opened up before me with that interview.
And I signed up for that the school and I went to many other schools after that too all always focused on learning herbal energetics and. I loved memorizing cause I am just kind of nerdy that way. But herbal energetics opened up the plant world in such a brilliant way, such a wonderful way. And it really just expanded kind of my whole world and paradigm of thinking, as well as just how fun herbs can be.
Lana: That's wonderful. And I remember the first time I went on your website, there was some sort of quiz related to human energetics, and this was a way for you to figure out what the person's energetic is and how to match it with herbal energetics.
Why is taste so important to Rosalee
Lana: You said that you studied with a lot of different herbalists and discovered many different approaches to learning information on herbs, but I know that tastes became really important for you as a measuring tools as you explore plants and as you're teaching them. Tell us why this makes it so easy and so useful for you as a teacher and for others as students.
Rosalee: Maybe I'll back up even further. I am sort of practical to almost to a fault. I have a very hard time kind of philosophizing about things or thinking about things hypothetically. And I say almost to a fault, cause sometimes we're called to do that and it makes my brain just kind of mash up.
so I'm very practical, basically very kinesthetic learner. I need to do something, feel something in order for me to get it. So just thinking about it, esoterically is not the way my brain works and what I love about taste is it's so incredibly practical and it's so natural to ask me, what do we do as babies when we want to figure something out, you know, we put it in our mouth. And so it makes sense to me that tasting herbs, feeling them in our body is the best way to figure things out. I feel like I should give a caveat there I'm obviously not talking about potentially toxic plants. We're talking about safe plants,
but being able to actually experience the plants is just... they say that a picture says a thousand words, that's kind of same with tastes, you know, a taste can equate thousands and thousands of words. I think if it is like the difference of you could read about an apple all day long, you can read the history of the apple. You could read about the energetics of the apple. You could read about the constituents. You could read about its color. You could even hear descriptions of how an apple might taste, but you never really know an apple until you actually taste it.
And then of course not all apples are the same. There's so many different kinds. You could eat an apple that was Kind of not quite ripe. We grow apples and we store them in the basement and apples in March taste very different than they did in October. There's so many different front ways to explore apples or herbs through our tastes. And it's really the best way to give us information.
And more and more when people come to me asking about herbs, what about this? What about that? You know, what about this species versus another species? Or what about this herbal product versus another herbal product? The best answer to all of that is always taste. We have to use our taste in order to understand what we're working with.
And because nature is not a constant which is a beautiful aspect of it, because we can't even expect the differing batches of herbal products from the same company to be the same year after year. And you're like wine, you know, it's like, there's the 76 version of wine the 77, it's always different. And that's the same with herbs. They're always going to be different from different species to different preparations, and on and on. And the only way that we can know that is by tastes where there's just no other way to ascertain the potency of herbs or even how they're going to work for us as individuals without interacting with them in a very practical way.
So for me, I love to teach about tastes because I feel like it's very empowering to students. They aren't taught like, Oh, in order to know the most, you have to memorize this 700 page manual, or, you have to rely on whatever kind of memorized information. Obviously there is some learning involved when it comes to herbalism that does require some reading and some outsourcing of information. But ultimately, if that is backed up with tastes and our own experiences, that's going to be the most powerful and transformational experience that herbalism has to offer.
Lana: I so completely and wholeheartedly agree with you. And I think I mentioned it in my previous conversations with you and perhaps with others that when I started learning herbal medicine and then teaching herbal medicine, my road was very different. I was coming from a perspective of a healthcare professional that was looking at books and databases and all these other things.
And until I started drinking the teas and tasting them and experiencing them. And until I started assigning my students to do the same thing, things have not shifted. Right. So things have changed so dramatically when people could have actually say, Oh, that tastes like apples or pineapple or whatever I'm thinking of chamomile versus just reading, Oh, it's an Aster family , it can cause these problems. And so always fascinates me that we remember only those things that we have tried or tasted, or just really experienced in essence, so completely, completely agree with you.
Tastes in other cultures
Lana: So I know that the concept of tastes have been explored in other cultures. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Rosalee: Yes. So as I mentioned, tasting things is very natural. We do it when we're babies and before we had things like microscopes or ways to ascertain what chemical constituents were ever particular herbs. What we had was what we call organoleptics, or sensing it with our own senses.
And so all over the world taste is very important. When I went to the East West school of herbology, It was one of the first things we learned and we learned about tastes from Traditional Chinese medicine and from Ayurveda. And it was just fascinating to me because I'd been studying Western herbalism for many years before I went there. And this was the first time I'd heard taste prioritized.
That is changing in Western herbalism now two decades later. Taste is more prominently found and it [00:14:00] was historically a part of that kind of Greek historical tradition. So this is kind of being revamped now.
What's interesting when you study different aspects of taste is to see how mostly similar they are. If you overlay Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese medicine, for example, which is what I have the most experience with. There is differing things, but they mostly line up or, and even when they're different, it's not that one is right and one is wrong, but they're looking at it through a different cultural lens, they have different perspectives.
And so, that's one thing I've really learned with herbalism is that I think of herbalism is like you're looking through a camera that has a lens on it and it's really blurry and you're just kind of focusing it more and more as you go. Not that there's like black and white and truth and falsity, but just these kind of different perspectives and the more you hang with all of it, the clear vision you get. And, yeah. And there's some times when I think of things, I think, Oh yeah, I learned that as part of Ayurveda and it makes so much sense in this particular moment or I learned that through the lens of Traditional Chinese medicine and it really clicks with me right now. So, all are valid.
And I'll just give an example of that to make it practical for people. so for example, in Chinese medicine, there's five tastes, pungent, salty, sour, bitter, and sweet. In Ayurveda there's the same tastes, but they have one additional one, which is astringent. So they have the six tastes in Ayurveda. And in Chinese medicine, they still recognize astringency, but they kind of classify it under sour. And so it's just not as separated out, as it is in Ayurveda. So that's just kind of an example. It's not that astringency doesn't exist in Chinese medicine. It's just kind of classified a little bit different and looked that a little bit differently.
Lana: You mentioned these different tastes. I remember when I took your course Tastes of Herbs you talked about five different tastes and also [00:16:00] energetics of plants. So which ones are you using?
Rosalee: So in the Taste of Herbs course I use the five tastes of Chinese medicine and organize it through that. And, and so in there there's pungent and salty, sour, bitter and sweet. And each of those has a energetics associated with it. But one thing that we have to love about plants is as Henriette Kress says, herbs don't read books. So anytime we try to confine things or create too rigid of boxes for plants to fit in, to escape. And so, but there are like kind of general energetics associated with those. And then there's kind of rogue plants that are just here and there. So.
Unique characteristics of each taste
Lana: Awesome. Thank you. So can we talk for a couple of minutes about unique characteristics that are associated with each taste that you mentioned?
Pungent
Rosalee: Yes. All right. Let's start with pungent. Pungent is our spicy herbs. There are warming herbs. I love to start with pendency because it's often the ones that we're most familiar with. So basically, all of our culinary herbs are essentially pungent herbs, things like basil oregano thyme, rosemary cumin, coriander, parsley - all aromatics.
So what I mean by that is if you crush the herbs, you'll have a scent that comes off of it. so aromatic in nature.
And almost all of these are warming as well. And so, what I mean by that is, for example, ginger or cayenne are both pungent herbs. You make a tea from either of those and you sip that tea, you'll feel that warmth in your belly you'll feel that warmth expand outwards in your body. Obviously cayenne very hot, hot herb. Ginger is very warming, garlic another wonderful one. So those are all pungent in nature and very hot.
And then there are ones, not all pungent herbs have to be hot like that. Things, like I mentioned, basil and rosemary also warming, but more so on that scale.
So that's another thing that I love about tasting is that I'll often hear questions from the students. They'll say, how warming is Rosemary or how warming is cayenne? We can try to like put that on a visual scale or try to explain it, but it really is, comes down to tasting and experiencing it in your body.
Another thing is that I'll often see, people say, they'll know that they have a warm constitution and they'll say, Oh, I can't have chamomile, it's warming. but once you start tasting these herbs and experiencing them, you'll feel that like camomile might be warming, but not that much.
And so if we just read it on paper, like I'm warm chamomile's warm. Okay. I shouldn't do that. that doesn't make sense as opposed to like tasting it and seeing like, Oh, how does this actually feel for me? Is this something I can take and enjoy and have it benefit me?
So, so yeah, so basically pungency is aromatic, it's warming in nature. So those are kind of its two main properties. These are often herbs that disperse and move things.
So one visual I like is I think of pungent herbs, like an erupting volcano. If a volcano is dormant, it's just sitting there, not a lot's going on with it, but if it's warmed up, that lava is flowing. So that's, that's the warmth, the pungency, it gets things moving.
A practical example of this as if you eat a really spicy soup or have a spicy tea and you have like congested sinuses at the same time, or sometimes even if you don't, we know that we'll need to keep a handkerchief nearby because it just gets things moving.
And so we're often using these pungent, aromatic, spicy herbs when we want something to move. That I could be like an example, congested lungs or sinuses. It could be slow or stagnant digestion. It could be slower stagnant circulation. Basically, when anything is not moving along the way we want things to move along, warming herbs can really get things going. so yeah, that's pungency. Does that sound like a good amount of information for pungency?
Okay.
Lana: Yes, definitely. Thank you!
Salty
Rosalee: Then we have salty. And salty herbs don't necessarily taste like salt. There are herbs like seaweed that can taste salty, but most of these herbs have what we might call a mineral taste. So we can think of them like kale does not taste salty, but it has kind of that mineral richness to it.
Things like stinging nettle, oat straw - these are all herbs that have a very high nutrient content in them. So they're very high in minerals, especially. And so these are our salty herbs, and these are often used as building herbs. So building for our bones, building for our skin, because they contain those vital nutrients that our bodies love to break down and use as building blocks to build ourselves back up.
Salty herbs often have an interesting relationship with the water or liquids in our body. So they're often lymphatic herbs, so they move lymph or they might be diuretic. So they move urine out of our bodies. So they have that interesting relationship and it's not always one or the other. That's why I can't say that salty herbs do one thing that they have an interesting relationship with water many times.
I'll just say like, Violet's are very moistening while stinging nettles are very drying in nature. So, that's a fun one to explore that kind of the aspect of moist and dry.
Sour
And next we have sour. And sour is, interesting taste one. I'm sure many people are familiar with. It's interesting though, I've been teaching tastes of herbs for over 10 [00:22:00] years, and this course for over eight years. And a lot of people confuse sour and bitter that you're just like something that they haven't teased apart yet.
Yeah. So, in the course I have an exercise having people taste something that's bitter, like very concentrated bitter, and then something that's very specifically sour. So you can tease those two things apart.
So sour is like biting into a lemon, you know, that is the sour taste. And sour herbs are enlivening. I just mentioned that like lemon and already I'm salivating more. So they enliven things. So they enliven in our digestion cause they get that whole digestive process started by increasing salivation and they just get our all of our juices running.
They're often cooling in nature. You think of reaching for lemonade on a hot summer's day. All berries are considered cooling and they often are. You think of like eating melons or something on a summer's day as well.
The sour is also a building taste because it's sparking our digestion and the better digestion we have the better we can build internally. It's often moving in nature and, in Ayurveda, as we talked about, they have the separate taste of a stringent, but astringency is a part of the sour taste within Chinese medicine.
Astringency is a really cool herbal action energetic. If you've eaten the slightly unripe banana, or had a really strong cup of black tea or tannic red wine, that dryness that you experienced in your mouth is the tightening and toning of your mucus membranes. And so astringency tightens and tones mucus membranes. So we use it for lax tissues. So, like a sore throat, when you have a swollen throat specifically, you can use a stringent herbs to tighten and tone that.
Basically all mucous membranes they can become lax, so excess diarrhea, not a fun topic, but it happens. That's an example of when we just tighten and tone the bowels and stop excess diarrhea. So excess perspiration can be used with a stringent, using it for wounds, using it for gums that have become lax. There's like 1,001 applications for astringency. And it's such a fun one too, because we don't really have drugs that do that. It's very specific to the herbal world and it's just so helpful in a very practical thing, like, Oh, these, these tissues are our lax. They're not tight enough. I'm going to take something and tighten those right up.
Lana: Right. And it makes sense. It was also very interesting you said that people confuse bitter and sour. I have a 99 year old grandmother who always confuses pungent and bitter. So every time she tries something that's a little spicy, she's like, Oh, it's bitter, it's bitter. I don't know if it's a cultural thing, like the perceptions of different tastes. so we have pungent, we have salty, we have sour. What are the other two?
Bitter
Rosalee: We have bitter which is the taste that people love to hate. And sometimes I think that like you said, it's like in the case of your grandmother is a pungent taste, or in the case of sour, if it's too strong and people might just think like, Oh, it's bitter. Yeah, because that's unpleasant, but bitter is making a comeback which has been pretty fascinating, just even in the last decade.
There's been a growing appreciation for the bitter taste. And I live in the Pacific Northwest where IPA beers have like risen to this intense art form and you go to pubs and you have like the list of beers. And then it has like the IBUs and like, you know exactly how bitter each one is and all the different kinds of hops. And so people are really getting the bitters that way.
A bitters are making it big in cocktails, but not just alcohol drinks bitters. There's also a cookbook out there. It's all about bitters. so yes, the bitter taste.
And so I mentioned hops has a bitter taste, dandelion greens, a lot of salads, but you know, not iceberg lettuce, but a lot of salads, especially, like French traditional salad greens are bitter in nature.
And what bitter does is it gets things moving. And it's interesting, the parallels between bitter and pungency, but bitters are mostly cooling, and they're draining. And so they often move things through us. and they also deal with stuck in stagnation, but on a slightly different way.
We use bitters when there's heat and inflammation, and it helps to cool things down, get things moving. So they are used a lot for digestion. And I think it was James Green who wrote the male herbal, and the medicine makers handbook. I think he might've been the first one that named the term bitter deficiency syndrome meaning that many of our common digestive problems that people experience today may just be due to the fact that we don't have bitters in our diet.
And an extreme of this would be like, if you can imagine, and somebody's just eating potatoes every day, day in and day out, that's all, they just like plain potatoes. I've never done this, but if you've done that, I just even imagine like how that might feel, you know, like heavy food sits in your belly, that sweetness day in and day out from those potatoes and how it's pretty easy to imagine how that might cause congestion or stagnancy in your digestive system.
And I know that not a lot of people eat only potatoes these days, but we do have a lot of people eating really pretty much just sweet foods in that respect, you know, lots of breads and pastas and these heavier foods.
And so, the bitter taste it's similar to sour that it does enliven our digestion gets our salivation going. It also specifically promotes the release of bile and the production of bile. So it helps digest fats. And it creates this whole cascade of digestive events that gets our digestive system moving. Bitter is not something we even have to say prescribe, but just something that can be a natural part of our lives and maybe missing from a lot of our lives.
And, I think of this often is, my husband is French and when we first met, I was an herbalist talking about herbs. He says, Oh yeah. You know, when I was little, I would go out to the fields with my mother and we would harvest dandelion greens every spring. And it was like, everybody did that because everybody knew they had to, he's from the Alps, and once I became more acquainted with Alps cuisine, especially the winter cuisine, it's like, basically potatoes, cheese and ham. Yeah. That's kind of what you consume like the whole winter. And so I can see, that's an important part of the tradition, especially in the springtime is to get those fresh spring greens, now bitter taste to get things moving. There's also in that region, a very strong tradition that's never been broken with bitters as aperitif or before meal drink. And, the first time I went to visit Xavier's dad, took us around to different bars, I guess you'd call them. But they're kind of like local establishments where they have their own, you know, bitters blends made from the plants in the region. And we'd go to each one, but like taste the difference, you know? And it was just so fascinating to me.
And this is talking like 12 years ago before bitters were really big here. and now that's definitely an up and coming thing. People have their own bitters blends at the bars and their own signature cocktails.
And meanwhile in the Alps it's an unbroken tradition and again, I can see why, because that food is just so heavy. So bitter really great for cooling for releasing and, a very needed aspect of digestion for us all.
Lana: And so the last one?
Sweet
Rosalee: Sweet, the one we love to love. Yes. Sweet taste is very building. Most foods are considered sweet and so it's very building and that, we need those foods every day to maintain our, overall wellness. Sweet herbs are often associated with the immune system as well. So they're very building and tonifying for the immune system, herbs that are considered sweet are things like astragalus, codonopsis. Almost all adaptogens, whether or not they actually taste sweet are classified as sweet. So for example, ashwagandha is considered sweet, but you know, if you put ashwagandha in your mouth, you're not like, Hmm, yummy dessert. It has kind of a bitter tastes to it, really. But it does have those hints of sweetness.
Once you start tasting the herbs and kind of tasting for those polysaccharides, you can start to experience that on the smaller level. But yes, so many herbs that are in the sweet taste are for the immune system, many are adaptogens. So these are kind of our are deeply building herbs. These are often used for people who are weak or kind of dealing with some kind of debility, people who are overly stressed or in dealing with those negative consequences. People who tend to get colds and flus a lot.
So a sweet taste is it's very nourishing. It's very building. and yeah, it doesn't necessarily mean something like sugar or honey necessarily.
Lana: Definitely.
Quick Break
Just a quick break here to remind you that Rosalee is offering three special recipes for the listeners of Plant Love Radio, Cardamom and chia seed pudding, Rose petal vinegar, and Adaptogens bon bons. To get these, please head over to the show notes at https://plantloveradio.com/69.
Another quick announcement here, the winner of our last episode's giveaway citrus essential oil sampler from Snow Lotus is Jess. Congratulations. Jess please reach out to me at lana@lanacamiel.com with your contact information. Thank you so much!
Now let's return back to the episode.
Tasting active ingredients
You mentioned something that is very interesting to me. They idea of tasting polysaccharides. So could we talk a little bit about this concept of tasting certain active ingredients in plants? Can someone train to really recognize these better? And perhaps, could you talk a little bit in general? How could someone become a better taster if you will?.
Rosalee: Yeah. So the answer is definitely yes. It's amazing what we can do with our sense of taste. I recently read a book about wine sommeliers and the amount of training they do and how they can finesse and pick out these individual things. I mean, it's just incredible. that is definitely an incredible skill and something that wine sommeliers take many, many, many years to refine and develop.
I have kind of more of a crude approach because like practical, "what do I need to learn?" but yeah, so polysaccharides, they taste sweet. And they are a carbohydrate and they have it sweet taste to them. And you can start to pick that out of plants. And there are some things like astragalus and codonopsis you taste those. They have pretty much an overt sweetness. You can really taste it strongly in there.
Then you start tasting things like medicinal mushrooms and some of those will be more bitter, but once you're like training yourself to like what that tastes like, even from just experiencing those other plants where it's more overt, you'll be able to pick that out.
I always talk about the taste of herbs specifically, but it's not just that what's on our tongue. It's also what we're feeling throughout our body. And that could be even things like texture. So a lot of polysaccharides have demulcent qualities to them as well. And what I mean by that is. If you make a, in fact I had oatmeal this morning for breakfast, and I ate all the oatmeal and then I was sitting outside for awhile. And then I went in to wash my bowl and it had been sitting there for awhile and I just totally noticed, I was like, Oh yeah, it's become like kind of like moist, slippery, slimy quality to it. Just like the little leftover bits of my bowl.
So oatmeal is a great way for people to experience that slippery, slimy demulcent quality. And there are plants like comfrey, or marshmallow root or mallow weed. They all have high amounts of that demulcent quality. And you can experience that texture in your mouth or on your skin, and then you can also feel that as it goes through your body.
So, for example, if you have a really hot digestive issue, let's say ulcer or heartburn, you can take a demulcent herb and you'll just feel that soothing coats your entire esophagus and go into your stomach. You can literally feel that inside of you. So again, it's not just what's on your tongue, but your entire feeling.
In terms of other constituents, I mostly focus on the flavor. I can taste bitter principles, but I don't necessarily like tease them out to be the different bitter constituents. Like for example, last time I looked, there was something like over 600 different bitter constituents. So I don't tease all those out, but I have no doubt that somebody could train themselves to do so.
Lana: Okay. Okay. But, but I think it's also, it's possible to go in one direction and also try to go in a different direction where you know that these are alkaloid rich herbs, for example, and you would taste the bitterness in them.
Rosalee: Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean now, like once you have the principles of the tastes and you like get them in your body, you can taste an herbs that you don't know. Again, you'd want to be safe. I'm not talking about tasting something that's unknown or potentially toxic, but you can taste something and have a sense of how it's used.
For example, there are some herbs out there, some very special herbs, like elecampane that are both bitter and pungent, tumeric is another one that's bitter and pungent. And when I taste those two together, I know that that's going to be an issue herb for digestion, because it was had, it has this like two punch aspect of digestion.
So absolutely when you taste plants, you're able to pull out those different flavors and you can make general assumptions about how they're going to be used. Through further experience and study that you get the nuances, but absolutely if I taste something that's overtly bitter I'm going have a very good idea of how that plant is used.
Another interesting example is things like echinacea and spilanthes - they have that zing to them that makes your mouth kind of numb and makes you salivate more. Echinacea and spilanthes are such different plants, but they have very similar tastes and they are used very similar. They're both called toothache plant. They're both used for sore throats. so there's a lot of examples like that. You know, you can definitely, you [00:37:00] develop that sense and you'll know how things are used.
Lana: That is absolutely fascinating. Yeah.
Rosalee: And you asked about tips for tasting herbs or ways to do it. And I love to talk about this because again, it's easy to just say, Oh, taste of herbs that, tastes herbs this, but developing that skill of tasting is very important.
And so what I recommend, first of all, Is to consciously taste things every day. And most of us do this because we eat every day. And think of taste is like a muscle that you want to strengthen. And so when you're eating, breakfast, lunch, snacks, whatever the case may be, it's just being a little bit more intentional about it. Like, what are the tastes in this. And teasing out things. It's rare that we have something that's just one overt taste. We often have a variety of tastes. For example, if we have a salad, we might have bitter greens, but we might also have a salad dressing that has lemon or vinegar in it with a sour taste. So it's just kind of breaking those apart, just being a little bit more intentional about it.
Because you are strengthening it like a muscle, your sense of taste, at first it might be kinda like, but then it just becomes more natural and it becomes a lot easier just to think about that and sets out those tastes.
When you're working with herbs, it's a great idea, always but especially in the beginning to have a journal and do tasting the plants and, jot down some quick notes, about how you are experiencing those tastes, might be how you're feeling that day and then observations and questions. And I'll get back to why that matters in just a moment.
Taste begins with smell. And so we always want to smell what we're tasting and that in itself gives us a lot of information. I talked about pungent herbs being aromatic. So, when we crush lavender and smell it, that tells us a lot right there. Just about lavender, not all herbs are going to have a strong aromatic sensation like [00:39:00] lavender, rosemary, but, most do have some type of smell to them.
And so you want to smell it and then. Then the first thing we focused on is how does it taste on our tongue? Is there one predominant taste? Are there other tastes? What are our opinions on that taste? And we're just kind of doing a mouth focused thought on taste. We can also feel how it literally feels in our mouth.
So I talked about stringency, tightens and tones the tissues or sour tastes, bitter tastes can help you salivate a lot more. So, what's going on in that way? And then we want to feel where that herb or that tea, whatever we're taking feels in our body. And that can just be so many different things and it can feel different on a different day.
So for example, if you have a stuffy nose or any kind of lung congestion and you have a pungent or aromatic and spicy [00:40:00] herbs, it's often you'll feel a release of some kind, you'll be able to breathe a little bit deeper. Maybe your sinuses were clear a bit. Now on another day when you don't have any congestion, you might not experience that.
So that's why, tasting herbs every single day under a variety of situations is very important because every time we taste, it gives us new information about ourselves, about the plant. So other things you might feel your tummy rumbling, or you might feel warmth spread out to your core, or you might feel cooler.
There's really no wrong answers. It's just noticing what you feel. So it's taking it beyond just what it feels like in our mouth and feeling like what it feels in our bodies. And then you can begin to get a sense of an herb is warming or cooling or drying or moistening, which is our basic four qualities of herbal energetics.
Sometimes these are so obvious, like we talked about a cayenne tea. Sip on cayenne tea, it's definitely going to initially feel very warming. And if you eat a cucumber, you eat some watermelon, you're probably going to find those to be cooling. Again, with the watermelon you'll probably think of that as moistening.
Drying can sometimes be a little bit difficult. When we taste something astringent, we have that tightening and toning in our mouth, which makes our mouth feel a bit dry. What's interesting about that is like by tightening and toning your mucus membranes, you're actually helping moisture stay in your body. So we say that is locally drying, but systemically moistening.
Sometimes herbs are drying because they are diuretics or diaphoretic, meaning they make you urinate more or they make you sweat. And, in that case you don't necessarily feel it right away, but you feel it over time. So an example of this, a stinging nettle.
Singing nettle is a beloved herb by many and many herbalists love to drink it as a very strong tea. And oftentimes people find like, Oh, I've been drinking nettle tea for the past week. And now I'm noticing my mouth is dry or my skin is dry or something like that. So sometimes it's not instantaneous takes some time, but that's all included in taste is feeling how the herbs work in that moment, feeling how they work over time.
And again, it's, there's so much nuance out of there. You know, when I drink stinging nettle, I do not notice that it's drying and some other people are like, Oh, I can't have stinging nettle at all. It's too drying for me. And so what's drying for one person is not drying for another.
Another interesting thing is that stinging nettle is a diuretic, which is one reason it comes off as drying. For many people, what is initially a diuretic is not longterm diuretics. So things like stinging nettle, even coffee are initially very diuretic. But then your body kind of like gets used to it and you don't have as much of a strong effect anymore.
So things change over time and your body too which all of this could sound overwhelming. I could get that. But what sounds overwhelming to me is trying to memorize all that as some kind of like, you know, ticking off a little box, but when you experience it, As you said, we just don't forget it, you know?
And you have that experience of stinging nettle being drying, or not drying, your diuretic or not diuretic. You remember much more. And another kind of tip for tasting herbs is that I've been alluding to, is that we want to taste all types of herbs that we know to be safe in all types of ways, so fresh herbs, dried herbs, take it as a tea, make it as a strong tea, make it as a weak tea. What does it taste like if I roast this plant first and then use it, how is it in food? Tasting tinctures.
When I go to herbal conferences, they have like the little vendors area always, and I love to go taste all the different tinctures cause it's so interesting to see. One person's echinacea tastes different from another person's echinacea and tasting all of those.
What does it feel like if I take this herb as a vinegar extract or make it as a syrup, so endless possibilities there. And that's another [00:44:00] thing, many times people don't get success with herbs, one, because they aren't using herbal energetics. So they aren't matching herbs to people. And two, because they're not using strong enough herbal preparations. In Western herbalism, there's kind of this tradition of using lot less herbal material and weaker preparations than is commonly seen in Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine.
And, and then there's also, people making herbal medicines that aren't making it strong enough just because they don't know how to. And so testing herbal potions is really important too. So you really you build that sense over time. You know the difference between like a really strong echinacea tincture versus something that's fairly weak.
And the only way you can do that, it's kind of testing maybe herbs or herbal products from companies that, you know have outstanding products and getting that baseline, but then testing a whole bunch of different things. So you get a sense of that because [00:45:00] yeah sometimes I'll see on Instagram someone prime made a tincture and they took like, Half cup of herbs and they threw them whole into a quart jar and then put alcohol on there. So they've made a tincture, basically that's like a one to a hundred ratio or something, and it's very weak in nature, because they haven't really maximized that ratio of alcohol to herbal material. Or cut it up or anything.
So, through tasting those things that we can know, like, Oh, it's not quite the oomph that I'm used to. So yeah, there's just so many ways that we can use taste. And again, not just in our mouth, but feeling it throughout our whole body.
Lana: And I agree with you, you reminding me I've been to one of the herbal conferences where I tried echinacea made by a company. And I remember my mouth was tingling and had a party in my mouth for the next 15 minutes. I've never experienced anything like this. Usually you taste it as you, you have the same sensation, but it doesn't last for that long of a time. Yeah, this really resonates with me. So thank you for mentioning this.
Teaching and learning through recipes
Lana: So Rosalee of all your instructions, you're always incredibly practical and application based. I want to ask you to talk about things that help you to connect these tastes to uses to actual preparations. Could you give us a couple of examples?
Rosalee: Yes. I love to teach through recipes, because it's, as you said, very practical and there's so much that you can learn from a recipe almost as a narrative or story, so as again, opposed to like learning. which is important to learn, but, you know, learning like take so many grams of this or it takes so much of that. You can actually make something, see what goes into that then experience it for yourself. So yeah, just the practical aspect of that is really important.
And then also like with things like dosage, that's another big topic in herbalism and another reason why I feel like sometimes people aren't successful, with herbs is because they're not doing dosage right. And recipes give us another way to experience that as well. Also, we can make elderberry syrup and experience what that is, we can make our own and then taste it, and see how that feels in our body. And what does that mean to take it once every hour? What does that mean take it once a day, and have all these different experiences associated with that recipe.
I also love recipes because they can become tradition. And that has become increasingly important. Two decades into herbalism I have had recipes that I've been making for over a decade. And I really love that it's different to like go online and order a bottle of tincture then to make your own fire cider every fall, you know, there's that connection to the earth. There's the tradition of making it, sharing that with friends and family, [00:48:00] gathering ingredients, trying slightly new ingredients one year. And we talked about wine and how there's like the wine from whatever year. That's how I feel about my fire ciders. Not that I keep them on hand for that long, but that I'm like, Oh, you know, my 2018 was super spicy. You know, I remember those those different years. So, now I'm not even sure I remembered your question long. I just went off on that.
Lana: No, this is great, but we were talking about a couple of examples that maybe you can connect our listeners, examples of some of these preparations.
Rosalee: well I guess, you know, talking about fire cider, that's a lovely one. Fire cider was popularized by Rosemary Gladstar. And is a great example of a pungent preparation that includes other tastes as well. So fire cider, herbalists love this one. So many of your listeners may already be familiar with it, but it's often contains things like ginger horseradish, onions, garlic, maybe a pepper of some kind in there, thrown in there, jalapeno or cayenne pepper. And then of course there's all sorts of different variations of that. Other things you can add in - I like to make what I call my garden fire cider. So I don't grow ginger, but I go all of those other ones. So I use all of those for my garden. Then I often add things like Rose hips to it, thyme, oregano. So I just love that it's all the tastes of my garden that year. And then also included in that is honey. So you had kind of a pretty big dollop of honey, and then you fill the jar the rest of the way with Apple cider vinegar. And you let that sit for awhile. Over time, I've learned that I like to let mine sit for not super long. It's kind of more potent if I don't let it sit for a long time. So I might let it sit for two weeks, strain it off.
Then the result is this very pungent tasting and all you imagine the ginger, the onions, the garlic, the horseradish, so you have that pungency to it, but then there's also this honey, so adds a sweetness to it. And then the vinegar, which has this overtly sour taste. So it's a very interesting in preparation. And when you taste this... yeah, that's a great example. You could read all about fire cider, but until you taste it. And when you taste it you'll know it is moving. It is warming. It's spicy, stimulating. It really is nice on a sore throat, but really nice for warming you up. People take it preventively, like a tablespoon a day or take it when you first feel something coming on.
My friend, Emily Hahn taught me to make a hot toddy out of it. So if I have like feeling like I'm chilled or have congestion and I'm sick and having a hot toddy at the end of the day, what made with fire cider.
So it's very spicy, very stimulating. And a great tradition to have in your home. We often learn, tastes separately. Like this is the pungent taste. This is the bitter taste, but this is a great example of these tastes coming together. And without the honey, I think that that would not be a very yummy preparation. It's like the honey kind of brings it all together and also mellows it out.
Lana: Right. I completely agree because I have done the fire cider without the honey, and it's a very, very different experience. So thank you. Thank you. so I hinted earlier that I took a course with you a few years ago, and before we started recording, I was showing your complete exercise collection. You were smiling seeing this. I really enjoyed it very much. And I know that you are planning to open the doors to your course soon. Could you tell us more, when is it happening? What will your students learn? What is the best way for our listeners to find out more.
Rosalee's course Taste of Herbs
Rosalee: Yeah, well, the best place to go will be, I'm sure you'll have a page. They'll have a link. so follow that link. and we enroll every September towards the end of September. And, often we, I do these kind of like free trainings so people can get a really good idea kind of like this podcast, hearing what it's like to [00:52:00] be in the course. And just more of like the course materials.
I see tastes of herbs is helping people go from being overwhelmed or confused about how to use herbs or feeling maybe even just questioning like, I use them once and then they didn't work. I used them again, they did, but you know, taking away that like, Hmm, is this going to work to being a lot more confident with using them.
So that's my end goal with tastes of herbs is really helping people feel confident and empowered to get the results they want out of herbs. And the course is split up into five modules. and lots of bonuses I've been teaching this particular course online for eight years. And so every year I'm kind of adding to it and, switching things up.
So we have those five modules. We go through each taste, that I've mentioned here. We spend two weeks going through those tastes. And we look at all sorts of, kind of the big picture and then the nitty gritty looking at herbal actions and doing all sorts of recipes and exercises to really bring it to life for people.
And, we release a new taste every two weeks, but people have access to the course for their whole life. And what I love about it is I have students who back in 2013 taking the course and they still come back and tell me how much they're still evolving the tastes and learning, which I recognized cause I am too. that's one of those ever evolving things for us. And, yeah, so that's, the nutshell of the courses we spend these 10 weeks or so together, going over each taste, making those recipes. I love to talk about how the homework is fun herbal recipes, sometimes the doubles as dessert or dinner, or lots of herbal remedies are included as well.
Lana: I always loved your chocolate preparations and exotic soups that might husband would enjoy at the end of this so that's awesome.
Rosalee, as we're coming to an end of this conversation, I just have one more question for you. Do you have any parting thoughts for us, perhaps in terms of taste of herbs or herbs in general?
Parting thoughts
Rosalee: I would just love to expand on how important taste is. And if someone is out there listening and you haven't really developed your sense of taste, it's something you can start doing today. As I mentioned, when I first started learning about herbs, I didn't mind memorizing herbs. I was so excited about herbalism. I just want to do it in any way, shape or form I could, but it was when I started really tasting herbs, experiencing herbal energetics, that the world just came alive for me. And there's so many layers to this. For example, when in front I'm talking a lot about France today, but you know, in French culture we have the terroir, which is like the taste of the land.
And that's another thing, fun thing to get into to go outside. Yeah. Tasting the Rose hips, tasting the elderberries, tasting things that come out of your garden and that connection, it brings you to the plants. It's so much deeper than simply turning the page of a book, making flashcards. So tastes is something that's open to all of us.
I often get this question. People say, well, I don't have it sense of taste anymore. We can still experience in our bodies. You can have a ginger tea and feel that warmth. So however we can actually taste and feel and experience herbs. That's how they really come to life. And then that knowledge is yours forever. It's not something you're going to readily forget. It's not something you're going to have to say like, Oh, well, so, and so said, so I'll just repeat that now it's something you really get to own. And I think there's just something so empowering about that. So deepening and there becomes this deeper and deeper relationship between you and the plants.
So, however you want to get started with taste. I just get started now.
Lana: That is so beautiful, Rosalee thank you so much. It was wonderful! Thank you.
Rosalee: Oh, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Thank you for listening!
Lana: Thank you so much for joining us today for this conversation with Rosalee de la Foret. I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have.
As I mentioned earlier, three of Rosalee's wonderful recipes can be found at https://plantloveradio.com/69. So please head over to download yours. You can also find additional links and resources mentioned in today's episode at the show notes.
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The music you hear in the introduction was written by a neighbor of mine, David Scholl and it's called Something about Cat - my deepest gratitude to Bill Gilligan for this opportunity to play it.
Thanks again for being here today. I really appreciate you. Till the next time, thank you for loving plants and planting love!