- Nature, the most powerful creative force on Earth.
I'm Chef Melissa King.
Cooking has taken me to incredible places.
Magical. (laughs)
From TV competitions and celebrity galas
to countries around the world,
I'm heading out to places I've never been before
to seek out new experiences
and to create new dishes inspired by nature.
Wow, this is amazing.
I'm teaming up with some of the world's greatest explorers
to go further than I've ever gone before.
This is insane.
- Stunning.
- To push my craft, creativity, and my cooking.
This is "Tasting Wild."
(upbeat music)
We are here just outside of Port Angeles, Washington
on the northern coast of the Olympic Peninsula.
This place is a really picturesque area.
There's an incredible forest
that hits this dramatic ocean coastline.
I'm here to meet on Anand Varma,
who shoots incredible photos of nature.
His photography and work really shows details
that I've never seen before.
(birds chirping)
I'm meeting him at an apiary,
a bee farm that I heard produces an extremely unique honey.
- [Anand] Hello.
- Hey, Anand.
- So nice to meet you, Melissa.
- How are you?
- Doing great, doing great.
Have you ever worn a bee suit before?
- I have not.
- All right. - It's a first.
- All right. - I always wanted to do this.
- Yeah, this is gonna be your suit.
Let's get suited up- - Thank you.
- And check out what's going on here.
- Cool.
- One of the early stories I worked on
for National Geographic was on honeybees,
and I actually kept a beehive in my backyard.
And that let me kind of study their lives.
You get up close, and you take the time to pay attention,
and you realize how much beauty
and complexity is all around us everywhere you look.
Have you ever looked inside a beehive before?
- No, first time.
I've been to apiaries,
but first time being able to get up close.
I'm curious of the flavor profile.
I love honey.
I cook with honey all the time.
But to be able to like get up close and personal,
I'm excited.
Can't wait to taste this honey.
- [Anand] I've heard great things about this.
- Yeah? - I haven't tried it yet.
- Hi. - Hi, hi.
Hello, this is Dan and Judy Harvey.
We've been here since 1985.
And when you have healthy bees
in the right weather conditions, they make a lot of honey.
- [Judy] Are you ready for this, Melissa?
- [Melissa] Yeah, I'm super excited.
- So one of the really cool things
about this area is this native plant called fireweed.
And so what Dan and Judy have done is set up their hives
so that the bees are almost exclusively
collecting the nectar and pollen
from this one kind of plant.
This native plant, fireweed, doesn't have a lot
of pesticides or herbicides sprayed on it.
So that means that the honey is super clean.
It's super pure, and it's all coming from a single flower.
So it has a unique flavor profile.
- Wow, that's what I'm curious about,
is the flavor notes of the fireweed
and what makes it unique and special.
- I can tell from Melissa's work,
she's somebody who pays really close attention to her craft.
And so as somebody who's that tuned in,
I'm really curious what kinds
of things she'll pick up on here.
- So if you'd like to see a queen,
this is gonna be the quickest way to see it.
- [Melissa] The king needs to meet her queen.
- [Judy] Aw. (laughs)
- [Melissa] Each box is a different queen?
- [Dan] Each box is a different queen.
You can see the pollen.
That's all pollen right there.
- Yeah. - Oh, yeah.
- [Dan] This is the honey, the nectar.
- [Anand] And the pollen's all one color, and you can tell
that there's this- - Yeah, mm-hm.
- [Anand] Can you flip it over and just set it here?
I'd love to take a picture
of some of these bees. - Oh, that's a great idea.
- When I decided to become a photographer,
macro photography became my specialty.
Nature is kind of the ultimate inspiration to keep exploring
and to keep discovering new details.
It's so surprising when you get up close to a honeybee,
especially its face, you realize they're covered in fur.
There's hairs coming out of their eyeballs.
You learn to appreciate them in a whole new way.
- Honey comes in a wide range of flavors.
You can really use it from savory dishes to sweet dishes.
It's almost like wine.
There's so many different nuances
that you can get from a single honey.
This is incredible.
I love seeing all the bees on here and what they're doing.
Let's go taste some honey.
- [Dan] Okay, let's go.
- That was so cool.
- [Judy] Yeah, loved it.
- [Melissa] That was amazing.
- [Judy] I think there's something really unique
about fireweed honey.
- Oh wow, mm.
Wanna dip my finger in there.
- It's so good. - Yeah.
It's very light, but also very clean-tasting.
It's so delicate in flavor profile.
- We thank you for coming.
It's been a pleasure.
It's always exciting to have somebody come
who's interested enough to wanna know more details.
Well, we'll see you hopefully again.
- All right, thanks so much. - Thank you.
- [Judy] Yeah.
- [Melissa] That bee farm was incredible.
- Yeah, I think what they're doing is really cool.
- Leaving the apiary,
Anand tells me we're going to investigate a tide pool.
It's one of my favorite things to do.
I've tide-pooled around the coast of California
and up through Oregon, but never this far north.
I love seafood so much.
It's one of my favorite ingredients to work with,
and I'm just excited to explore this area
and see if there's mussels or barnacles,
maybe even clams that we can find.
- I can't wait to show you what's in there.
There's this island.
It's surrounded by tide pools,
tons of cool little stuff in those pools.
- I've seen some of your work,
and I've seen beads of water spraying off of a hummingbird,
which is just incredible
to be able to capture that type of detail.
So what got you into macro photography?
- I think it was just what I did as a kid.
I would head out the back door
in my childhood home in Atlanta,
and I'd head down to the creek in my backyard.
And it was like every time you pull up a rock
or turn over a log,
there'd be some weird little bug or snake or salamander.
Then somewhere along the way,
I fell in love with exploring the natural world,
and I found out that photography could be this way
of sharing my discoveries with other people.
Every time I've ever been tide-pooling,
I see a creature I've never seen in my life.
That's one of the rewards of paying close attention.
You spend the time to look at something carefully,
and you get to discover something new,
and it motivates you to keep going.
So we are in a pretty special spot
where the tide has pulled out,
and it's gonna allow us to explore a lot more
than what we'd be able to see any other time of day.
- I'm hoping to really tie in all the ingredients
that we find in this tide pool into a dish.
This is insane.
- Stunning. - Yeah.
- All right, so I think we gotta pick our way down
this kind of cliff here.
- We're making our way down these rocks,
and I see mussels, barnacles, starfish.
Wow, look at all the seaweed. - Yeah.
- [Melissa] Look at this, kombu.
- [Anand] Have you ever harvested your own?
- Absolutely.
Yeah, you can dry all this
and use it for any sort of applications
from broths to soups.
- Oh, cool.
- [Melissa] There's so much life here to explore.
- [Anand] You see a rock covered in mussels,
and then you get down to one of those mussels,
and it's covered in limpets.
And that limpet has its own algae,
and there's just these levels upon levels of detail
and life and biodiversity.
And that's what makes tide pools so special.
- Wow, this is so cool.
- Whoa. - Right, look.
- What is that?
- They're just peeking out.
- [Anand] Look at how much it's moving.
- [Melissa] Like a dinosaur.
- That's wild.
You can kind of see there's a big rock
in the cave. - Oh yeah, right over there.
- If we aim for the left side of that,
I think that's gonna be-
- Tide's coming in already.
- Yeah. - It was fast.
- [Anand] We start turning rocks here.
I think there's some cool stuff to find.
- [Melissa] Yeah?
It's like a starfish, like a baby, baby starfish.
Oh, wow. - Oh my God.
I have never seen this before.
- What is that?
Wow.
There's so many colors and creatures here to explore,
and it's really endless.
I'm feeling inspired by all the layers
that are being revealed.
It makes me think about my own cooking
and the layers within food.
- [Anand] Look at this.
It's a sea star.
- [Melissa] What?
- They call these flood stars.
- No way.
- [Anand] Look at that color.
- The tide's coming in,
but I wanna go look for some clams on the beach.
I can't believe we were just out there.
- It's surrounded by water now.
It's like you've gotta take a boat to get to where we were.
What are we looking for? - All right.
So you just kind of start raking.
When you see little bubbles like that,
there might be something there.
Let's see what happens.
So you'll find cockles, littlenecks.
- Oh, whoa.
What's that? What's that?
- We've got littleneck. - Oh cool.
All right.
- Got some littlenecks,
some cockles. - Little baby cockle.
- It's a little baby cockle.
It's gonna be tasty.
But yeah, these are gonna be great for steaming.
- Okay. - The littlenecks.
I think we'll do some sort of tom kha
or some sort of steamed clam and mussel dish,
I think could be fun. - It sounds amazing.
- [Melissa] As we're heading back to the car,
we find some beautiful-looking sea beans,
which I'd love to include in my dishes somehow.
Give it a try.
Kind tastes like the ocean.
- Oh, wow.
It's like a salty pickle almost.
- Exactly. - Yeah.
- [Melissa] The details we saw today at the apiary
and along the coast were astonishing.
I can't wait to integrate all the flavors we found
into a meal for Anand tomorrow.
Okay, we're almost there.
I'm so excited for you to see this spot
on the coast that I've found. - Yeah?
Awesome.
- Yeah, it's really beautiful.
It's gonna be great to be able to cook out on the beach.
We're gonna set up some live fire, do a little cookout.
- So while you're setting up,
I'd love to create a little field studio,
and I'll shoot some of the ingredients.
I'll get some closeups of the mussels in particular.
They look really cool up close.
- I'd love to see that.
All right, here we are.
(awe-inspiring music)
Wow, this is gorgeous.
- [Anand] What a day, huh?
- [Melissa] It's beautiful.
All right, let's grab some stuff from the trunk.
- All right.
- I'm gonna get the kitchen started over on the beach.
- [Anand] Okay.
- And get the fire started.
- Awesome.
One of the most exciting parts
about photography is getting to see this pattern
or detail that you didn't notice at first glance.
You zoom in with the macro lens, and you take a picture,
and it's that moment where you see something
on the back of the camera that you never noticed before.
- [Melissa] All right, the fire's rolling.
Whoa, what's happening here? - Awesome.
Here, check this out.
Look at this little mussel.
I zoom way in here.
Look at that. - Oh my goodness.
- [Anand] Isn't that crazy?
- [Melissa] I cook with mussels all the time,
but I've never seen it like this before.
- [Anand] Right?
- That's a barnacle? - Uh-huh.
- Whoa, it's so cool.
This is incredible work.
- Oh, thank you. - This is stunning.
Well, are you ready to make some dinner with me?
- All right, that sounds great.
- Let's go.
All right, here we are.
- Oh my God. (both laugh)
- It's pretty beautiful, right?
- Oh, wow.
- I hope Anand notices the details of the sea beans, kombu,
all the ingredients that we've harvested together.
I also really wanna find a place for Dan and Judy's honey.
I want it to tell a story.
I want him to taste those flavors
and be reminded of where we are.
We're making a Szechuan chili butter,
oysters that are grilled with a little bit
of that honey that we picked up earlier.
And we're also doing a tom kha.
- I can't believe it.
- Let's start with these Szechuan chili butter
wood fire grilled oysters with honey.
We're gonna cook 'em right on that fire.
You want really high heat.
- [Anand] Okay.
- [Melissa] That's what's gonna get them caramelized.
It'll cook really quickly
within a minute or so. - Oh my God.
- Now we're cooking.
Here we go.
That's our appetizer number one.
- [Anand] Wow.
- You'll see how it's nice
and golden brown around the edges.
- Uh-huh. - It was just bubbling.
Cheers.
- Thanks so much, Melissa.
Mm.
Mm, it's incredible.
It's incredible.
- Thank you.
Don't waste the liquor.
So I'll be making you a tom kha mussels and clams,
sort of tide pool-inspired soup.
All right.
- Oh, wow.
- Now let's go with the clams
and the mussels.
You can throw all that in.
I'm also gonna break up this lemongrass.
This is also a key component.
- Okay.
- To a tom kha. - Oh wow, okay.
- All right, let's throw some sake in.
- [Anand] Wow.
- Little bit of stock and then some coconut milk.
- Okay.
- Key ingredient to a tom kha.
This cooks pretty quick.
Just right when they open,
it's catching it at that right moment.
The second they open,
that's when we're gonna pull this off the stove.
All of these ingredients we gathered here,
and it really is just concentrating down into this one pot.
- Couldn't get more local than this.
- Right?
All right, I'm gonna bring this over to the table,
and we'll plate it up over there.
- Okay.
- As I'm layering this in,
I want this to look like the tide pool.
I want it to resemble the place that we went together,
basil, cilantro, sea beans
that we had together. - Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [Melissa] And a big squeeze of lime.
- [Anand] Oh wow.
- And that is our tom kha.
- Okay.
I am so excited. - With all the shellfish
that we got together.
- Okay, so, - Bring that over there.
- [Anand] All right.
- With some ice green tea.
Ah! - Thank you so much.
- It's great. - Thank you so much.
This is-
- Nature's dining room.
- Right.
It's not every day you get to do this
with a professional chef and in a beautiful place
and delicious, beautiful-looking food.
- [Melissa] Hopefully it'll be a memorable moment for you
as much as it is for me.
- Believe me, you've succeeded.
I'm gonna remember this for a long time.
- Thank you.
These moments are all about connection,
and food is something that brings everyone together.
Being able to be here, like literally on the beach,
eating together, is such a special moment.
So, thank you for that.
- Oh, thank you.
- Thank you for the adventures.
To the tide pools.
- (laughs) To the tide pool.
- [Melissa] To the tide pools.
I came to the Olympic Peninsula looking
for sweeping views along the vast coastline.
What I discovered was the beauty in all the little things
and how important it is to look closer, keep exploring,
and take in the amazing details of the world around us.
(adventurous music)