Slightly Sooty Salad: Late-summer Sumac-ade

Sumac-ade is a quick summer foraging project that can fit seamlessly into your next visit to Prospect Park. The sumac spice you may know from Middle Eastern cuisines comes from the dried and ground berries of Rhus coriaria, or tanner’s sumac, a name earned from the plant’s high tannin content and historical use in tanning hides.

Rhus coriaria is closely related to North America’s native, non-toxic sumac species: staghorn sumac, smooth sumac, winged sumac and fragrant sumac. Ancient Romans reportedly used sumac to add tartness to food and drink before lemons were brought to Europe. Indigenous peoples in North America used sumac for food, including drinks like the sumac-ade described below, as well as medicine.

The infamous poison sumac is more distantly related to the edible varieties and is easy to distinguish from them at harvest time: it has light green to white berries that hang down instead of standing upright.

Staghorn sumac is the most common of the edible sumacs in the U.S. and is a striking plant when it is showcasing its fuzzy, cone-shaped, deep-red berry clusters. All of the sumacs aside from poison sumac have variations of these upright red berries and can be dried, ground and sifted to create a spice similar to sumac made from Rhus coriaria, or steeped in water to make a lemonade-like tea. The peeled, tender spring shoots are also edible, but we’ll save that project for a separate article.

You can find staghorn sumac growing beside aboveground subway tracks, along highways or in out-of-the-way places where human disturbance has created an opening for sunlight. The fuzzy, deep-red cones sticking up from the plant make it one of the easiest plants to identify from a distance.

The red cones, or bobs, first appear in July in New York City. They remain on the plant for several months, typically into the following spring before finally disintegrating and breaking apart from exposure to the weather. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with staghorn sumac, you may start noticing it all around you.

To harvest the bobs, use a pair of scissors or your fingers to snap off the cluster at its base. It is usually fairly easy to remove the entire cluster neatly. Ideally, harvest from a plant that isn’t next to a busy road because an extensive cleansing soak can remove a lot of the flavor.

The flavor intensity of the berries varies considerably between plants and depending on how much rain and weather exposure they have had. The texture may be off-putting to some people, but you can sample them right off the tree to get a sense of the strength of the flavor.

Once home, give the bobs a quick rinse to remove any debris or small insects. Cover them with room-temperature or cool water in a bowl. Avoid hot water, which will extract more of the tannic content and give the drink a more bitter flavor.

You can gently break apart the bunches of berries with your fingers to release more flavor. Let them sit for a few hours or overnight. Sample the liquid at any point and decide whether you want to let it soak longer.

When your sumac-ade is ready to drink, strain out the fuzzy berries with a fine-mesh strainer, add your sweetener of choice if desired and chill. We have found sumac-ade to resemble the flavor of a tea more closely than a lemonade, but however you describe it, it is refreshing.

Feel free to share your thoughts about sumac or any other local plants at slightlysooty@gmail.com.