Over the past few years, Deja and I have found a lot of joy in exploring the wild ingredients that grow right here in New England. Foraging has opened our eyes to a whole new world of flavors and ingredients that are often overlooked but deeply connected to the land around us. One ingredient that recently caught our attention is smooth sumac, a native plant with bright red berries and a tangy, citrus-like flavor.
Identifying Sumac: Edible vs. Poisonous
Before harvesting, it’s important to know how to safely identify edible sumac. Smooth sumac (Rhus glabra) and staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) are both edible and easy to recognize by their upright clusters of bright red, fuzzy berries that form a cone shape at the tips of the branches. Their leaves are long and pointed, growing in pairs along a central stem, and the plants often grow along roadsides, meadows, and open sunny areas.
Poison sumac (Toxicodendron vernix), on the other hand, looks quite different. It produces drooping clusters of white or pale green berries instead of red ones and typically grows in wet, swampy areas rather than dry, open fields. Its leaves are smooth-edged and glossy, with 7–13 leaflets per stem. If you see white berries and wet ground-avoid it entirely.
Harvesting and Using Wild Sumac
Throughout our professional culinary careers, we rarely had opportunities to cook with sumac. Between Deja and I, most of our time has been spent in luxury hotels, working with ingredients and techniques inspired by Italy and Northern Europe. While both of us have dabbled in Asian cuisine—Deja being well-versed in Thai and Indian curries, and my background leaning toward European cooking with influences from my Southern roots and love of BBQ—sumac was never really part of our pantry.
In truth, we rarely use the ingredient. Whenever I tasted the sumac powder that had been forgotten behind our other spices, it lacked the brightness that its known for. What I’ve recently learned, after working with the wild sumac we harvested here in Rhode Island, is that its potency fades quickly. That vivid, lemony, cranberry-like flavor sumac is known for, diminishes if it’s not used fresh or properly stored.
We harvested whole berry clusters in early October, when the fruit had turned a deep, rich red. This is when sumac is at its best-fully ripe, with a tangy, citrusy powder coating the berries. Timing is key: if it rains for several days after the berries ripen, much of that flavor can wash away. We found that pruning shears (available on our site) made harvesting easy and efficient.
We love using new ingredients in familiar ways, so we decided to make sumac ice cream by steeping the berries into a simple syrup and adding that to the custard base. We kept the recipe simple to let the sumac shine, adding only a touch of locally made Rum Barrel Aged Vanilla Extract from Laura’s Best. The result was incredible-Deja and I both agreed the flavor reminded us of pie dough or buttery pastry crust. Combined with the sumac’s bright citrus notes, the ice cream tasted like a lemon bar: vibrant, tart, notes of raspberry and delicately sweet.
Exploring wild ingredients like sumac has reminded us how much flavor and inspiration can be found just outside our door. We can’t wait to keep experimenting with this native New England plant—and to share more ways to bring foraged flavors into your kitchen.
Tools used: Pruning Shears
Ingredients used: Lauren’s Best Rum Vanilla Extract
Happy Hunting!
Deja & Karsten Hart
Culinary Harts