From Salted Mushrooms to Biltong: 10 Fascinating Wild Food Traditions from Around the World

From Arctic whale hunters to Eastern European mushroom foragers, cultures around the world have developed remarkable ways to preserve and enjoy the wild harvest.

One of my favorite parts about hunting, fishing, and foraging is that they have a way of making the world feel both bigger and smaller at the same time.

On one hand, every landscape has its own traditions, ingredients, and ways of doing things. On the other, the farther you travel, the more you realize that people everywhere have wrestled with many of the same questions. What do you do when the mushrooms are all fruiting at once? How do you preserve a successful hunt before refrigeration? What’s the best way to make an older animal tender, or stretch a seasonal harvest through the winter?

The answers are often wonderfully different, but the problems themselves are surprisingly familiar.

As North American hunters, anglers, and foragers, we tend to think about jerky, smoked fish, pickled ramps, or a carefully wrapped package of venison in the freezer. Elsewhere in the world, those same instincts gave rise to salted wild mushrooms, air-dried antelope, fermented fish, smoked reindeer hearts, and earth ovens loaded with the day’s harvest.

The ten traditions below aren’t presented as oddities or culinary dares. They’re living food cultures, shaped by landscapes, seasons, and generations of people learning how to make the most of the wild foods around them. And if you ever find yourself traveling through one of these places, they’re well worth seeking out for yourself!

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#1. Eastern European Salted Mushrooms

In much of North America, most mushroom hunters preserve their harvest by drying, freezing, or pickling. Across large parts of Eastern Europe, however, one of the oldest and most beloved methods has long been salting.

Species such as saffron milk caps, milkcaps, russulas, and boletes are carefully cleaned, layered with coarse salt, dill, garlic, horseradish leaves, currant leaves, and spices, then weighted down and left to cure. Over the course of several weeks, naturally occurring lactic acid bacteria transform the mushrooms, giving them a pleasantly tangy flavor and a firm, almost crunchy texture. The finished product is often served alongside boiled potatoes, onions, rye bread, sour cream, or a shot of vodka.

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#2. Chinese Waxed Duck

Long before refrigeration, preserving a successful hunt or market harvest often meant turning to salt, wind, and time. In southern China, one of the classic expressions of this idea is waxed duck, or là yā.

Traditionally, ducks are rubbed with salt and aromatics, lightly cured, and then hung to air dry during the cool, dry months of winter. The process concentrates the flavor while firming the meat, producing a rich, savory ingredient that is sliced into stir fries, steamed with rice, or added to soups and clay pot dishes. Strangely, no actual wax is used in this preparation.

Although domestic ducks are most common today, the technique itself is perfectly suited to wild waterfowl.

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#3. Korean Yukhoe

To many Western diners, raw game may sound unusual, but preparations like steak tartare and carpaccio have existed for centuries. Korea’s answer is yukhoe, a dish traditionally built from finely sliced raw beef, though deer and roe deer were also historically eaten in similar ways by hunting communities.

The meat is dressed simply with soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, and often julienned Asian pear, before being topped with toasted sesame seeds and a raw egg yolk. The result is remarkably delicate, highlighting the quality and freshness of the meat rather than covering it up.

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#4. Sámi Smoked Reindeer Heart

Across the far north of Scandinavia, the Indigenous Sámi people have built a culture deeply connected to reindeer. Traditionally, virtually every part of the animal is valued, from the hides and antlers to the organs and bones.

The heart is often lightly salted and slowly cold-smoked over birch or willow, creating a deeply flavored meat that can be sliced thin and eaten much like fine charcuterie. The smoking process not only preserves the heart, but also imparts a subtle woodsy flavor that reflects the boreal landscape itself.

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#5. French Civet de Lièvre

Wild hare can be a challenging animal to cook. Older animals are lean, muscular, and full of connective tissue, making them far better suited to slow braising than quick roasting.

French cooks solved that problem centuries ago with civet de lièvre, a rich stew in which hare is slowly cooked with red wine, aromatics, and stock until tender. Traditionally, the sauce is finished with the animal’s blood and liver, creating an intensely flavorful dish with remarkable depth and body.

While the idea of cooking with blood may seem unusual to some modern diners, it reflects an older nose-to-tail philosophy that many hunters still appreciate today: if an animal gives its life, every useful part deserves respect.

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#6. Arctic Muktuk

For Inuit communities across the Arctic, survival has always depended on making full use of the animals harvested from an often unforgiving environment. One of the best-known examples is muktuk, a traditional food consisting of whale skin and the layer of blubber attached beneath it.

Muktuk may be eaten fresh, frozen, pickled, or lightly fermented, depending on local customs and the species involved. The dark skin provides a pleasantly chewy texture, while the blubber contributes richness and valuable calories in a region where fat has historically been one of the most precious nutrients available.

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#7. Naga Smoked Meat

In the forested hills of Northeast India, smoking has long been one of the most important methods of preserving meat. Among the many Naga peoples of the region, cuts of pork, fish, and historically wild game are often hung above the household hearth, where they slowly dry and absorb smoke over the course of days or even weeks.

The finished meat develops a concentrated flavor unlike anything produced by modern barbecue smokers. It is commonly cooked with bamboo shoots, fermented soybeans known as axone, wild herbs, and the region’s famously spicy ghost peppers.

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#8. Japanese Tsukudani

Not every fishing trip ends with trophy-sized catches. Throughout Japan, generations of cooks developed a clever solution for preserving smaller fish, freshwater shrimp, shellfish, seaweed, and even insects that might otherwise spoil quickly.

Known as tsukudani, the process involves slowly simmering the harvest in soy sauce, mirin, sugar, and sake until the liquid reduces and the food becomes deeply seasoned and remarkably shelf stable. Tiny river fish are perhaps the most iconic version, most often served alongside bowls of steamed rice.

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#9. Southern African Biltong

Perhaps no preserved wild meat is more famous than biltong. Developed in southern Africa through a combination of Indigenous drying practices and European curing traditions, it was originally a practical way to preserve antelope and other game harvested on long journeys.

Strips of meat are seasoned simply with salt, vinegar, black pepper, and toasted coriander before being air dried until firm. Unlike North American jerky, biltong is usually unsmoked and often retains a slightly tender center.

Whether made from kudu, springbok, wildebeest, or beef, the result is a concentrated expression of the animal itself. In fact, many game animals in Africa are made entirely into biltong!

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#10. Māori Hāngi

Cooking over fire is nearly universal, but the Māori people of New Zealand developed a method that transforms the earth itself into an oven. Known as hāngi, the process involves heating large stones over a fire before placing baskets of food into a pit, covering everything with earth, and allowing it to cook slowly for several hours.

Historically, wild birds, eels, shellfish, and gathered plants all found their way into the hāngi alongside cultivated foods. The long, gentle cooking produces exceptionally tender meat while infusing everything with subtle smoky and earthy notes.

This is a communal celebration of the harvest, bringing people together to share the gifts of the land and water.

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Do you come from a place with interesting wild food traditions? We’d love to hear about them! Let us know in the comments.