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Sean Sherman shines a light on Native American traditions with cranberry wojape

"The Sioux Chef" Sean Sherman believes in using ingredients that are indigenous to the land — and this sauce fits the bill.
Sherman, who was raised in Pine Ridge, South Dakota and currently lives in Minneapolis, loves to show people that great food can be made using ingredients that are indigenous to this continent.
Sherman, who was raised in Pine Ridge, South Dakota and currently lives in Minneapolis, loves to show people that great food can be made using ingredients that are indigenous to this continent.Nathan Congleton / TODAY
/ Source: TODAY

Sean Sherman, a James Beard award winning chef and member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, stopped by Al Roker's new podcast, "Cooking Up a Storm with Al Roker" to teach him a recipe that just might replace cranberry sauce on your Thanksgiving table this year.

Sherman, who was raised in Pine Ridge, South Dakota and currently lives in Minneapolis, loves to show people that great food can be made using ingredients that are indigenous to this continent. His recipe for wojape, a traditional sauce made from berries, will not only make you think twice about cranberries but also about the holiday we we eat them on.

Listen to the "Cooking Up the Storm" podcast!

Sherman's restaurant, Owamni is right on the Mississippi River, and showcases modern Indigenous dishes by utilizing local, wild foods. The result is that the food evokes the place where it is from instead of relying on what he calls "colonized ingredients."

"We cut out ingredients that weren't from here," he said of his restaurant. "So we removed things like dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, beef, pork, chicken, things that were introduced to these lands. And we really focus on: What were the foods of where we were, or where we are?"

Nathan Congleton / TODAY

Instead, Sherman uses "wild foods," native agricultural products such as corns, beans, squash and maple syrup. To try his take on cranberry sauce, you'll only need three ingredients: cranberries, rose hips and maple syrup.

"All three of those things live together," explained Sherman. "So we can find a cranberry bog in the Great Lakes regions. And you can look around and find wild roses and find maple trees."

Al asked Sherman more about his amazing recipe and how his family influenced his view of Thanksgiving.

Cranberry Wojape

Wojape is something you grew up with. How did your grandmother make it?

Well, we traditionally use chokecherries, because the chokecherry trees grew all over the plains, around the Badlands and Black Hills in South Dakota. So we harvested a ton of chokecherries. And then they would just cook it down with water, and sweeten it if it needs to be sweetened a little bit. But for me, that aroma just sends me right back to being five years old.

The recipe, if you don't count water, has three ingredients. How do we start?

All we're going do, basically, is just put everything in a pot. We added 16 ounces, or one pound, of cranberry. A quarter cup of maple (syrup). Two ounces of seeded rose hips. And two cups of water. It's a pretty simple recipe. And all of these, both the rose hips and the cranberries have so much natural pectin, it just thickens up so nicely.

And it's the simplest recipe in the world. Everybody has cranberries on their Thanksgiving table, and this is just looking at it through a different lens. And we even put things like cedar or pine or something to give it a little flavor of the forest.

Nathan Congleton / TODAY

Where do you get rose hips?

You can find rose hips online. You can find them at some health food stores. But we harvest a lot of them wild, because they're all around the lakes, they're all around the forest. They're all around the plains. We try to entice people to learn about the plants of their regions, and there's so much food and medicine and stuff that we can be doing with this. And some natural sweeteners really go really well with this.

Sean, what are rose hips? All I can think of is a flower that looks like Elvis, singing.

So, if you know what a rose plant looks like, you'll find these little red blossom pieces on there. And as they dry up, they get really sweet and tart. And it's a wonderful flavor. So I harvest a lot of wild foods in the forest and on the Great Plains, and there's rose hips all over the place. And they're really fun to harvest.

Thanksgiving, for the Indigenous people of our country has to be a complicated holiday?

It absolutely is. If you look at the Pilgrim and the Indian story, you know, there's a lot of erasure going on. It's kind of like, "Remember that time we had you over for dinner a few hundred years ago?"

It doesn't talk about all of the really intense trauma that happened to Indigenous peoples, especially in the 1700s and 1800s, and even through the 1900s. And so there's a lot of repair work to do, and we shouldn't be celebrating those stories that really have no basis in reality. But we can be celebrating holidays to come together as people, and as families, and to celebrate food. And why not celebrate the food of the land you're standing on?

Was it difficult for you celebrating Thanksgiving growing up?

You know, it's just complicated, like you said. So, some family really embraced it and really loved the whole dinner, the whole classical dinner. And others were really upset about the whole story for obvious reasons. And so I have lots of family members that won't celebrate Thanksgiving. But I feel like we can grow out of that. I feel like we can move forward with it. I feel like that particular holiday doesn't have to carry that mythology with it, and we don't have to single out an entire culture with an untrue story.

I really believe that we should use this holiday not to celebrate a myth, but to really use it to come together and celebrate just being together in the modern day right now, today, and why not celebrate it with food from where we are?

Is food the great unifier?

It really is, because we all have food in common. And cultural food is something that's really important. It's our identity. We think about our parents and our grandparents and the foods that they passed down. And I want to see a world where we can find Indigenous restaurants all over the nation celebrating the history and the land of wherever that might be.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity — for the full conversation, listen to "Cooking Up a Storm with Al Roker" wherever you find your podcasts.