Julia Georgallis Wants You to Eat Your Christmas Tree

There’s a fine line between indulgence and excess, especially around the holidays. This is perhaps most evident in our treatment of the ol’ tannenbaum. Every year, 25-30 million conifers make the journey from forest to living room, before finally being hauled out to the curb for disposal. That’s a lot of dead trees.

And while these trees certainly can be recycled, they also can be eaten. A few years ago, UK-based baker and cook Julia Georgallis published “How to Eat Your Christmas Tree,” a collection of more than 30 recipes that explore the culinary gifts these trees have to offer, and how to reuse, recycle and rethink our approach to one of the most wasteful times of year.

In a recent conversation over Zoom, we sat down to discuss the unexpected flavor profile of conifers, the best way to use those dried, sad branches, and the Christmas tree preparation that will make you feel downright chef-y.

How many trees fall under the category of “Christmas tree”?

I think that it's primarily pine, fir, and spruce. That's my understanding of it. You hear them referred to as conifers, and there's a lot more conifers than pine, fir, and spruce, but those seem to be the most commonly bought ones. I've also seen people use trees like cedar. Technically, they are conifers, but they're not that common.

And are all of them edible?

No. Pine, fir, and spruce are, but things like cedar — and I actually also have seen some cypress trees used as well — are not. So, that's kind of tricky. Also, the trees that we buy, to keep as Christmas trees, a lot of them are not grown to eat, so they're sprayed with pesticides, and I've seen trees sprayed green and that kind of stuff. They are edible, but a lot of them are grown kind of industrially in a way that isn't really for consumption, so [ask] the grower what they put on their trees. In the UK, it's way more common now to have organically grown trees.

Where do you recommend people buy their Christmas trees?

I have actually put some resources in the back of my book. Different countries have different kinds of associations. And in the UK there is a Christmas tree grower association. I personally think the small farmers who are just growing organically are really great people to buy from. I don't live in London. I live by the sea on the south coast and there's lots of farms there and a lot of those grow Christmas trees to make some more money, and that's quite nice. So, definitely the local growers are better.

There's also a few growers right around in London where I grew up. One springs to mind in particular. She grows all the Christmas trees, and the trees that she cuts down and doesn't sell, she reuses them and sells them to people who keep horses. I think once she sold a bunch of trees to a driving range because they were mulched down or something like that. But a lot of these people do have other ways of reusing the stuff that they don't sell.

Personally, I like keeping my trees. You know you buy the tree [in a] pot? I would say that is the most sustainable because you buy them and then they're yours. They're basically your house plant. Once you start keeping them as houseplants you realize how much it takes to grow them, because the trees that we typically buy are about 12 to 15 years old, and they're still really small. So the really big ones — you kind of understand they've actually taken a really long time to grow, so that's a really old tree that you're then using for like a month and then discarding.

I went to dinner somewhere recently in a brewery and the guy had cut down a 30-foot tree to have in his brewery. It was incredible to see this huge tree, but i was just thinking it's got to be hundreds of years old.

Which parts of the tree generally are edible?

Technically, all of it. It's just you probably don't want to eat all of it because it doesn't taste very nice. In terms of the bark, you can actually eat the top layer of the bark. You're always seeing survival guides like, “What to eat when you're stuck in the forest and there's nothing else to eat.” You can peel back Christmas tree bark — or any tree bark — because it's got lots of vitamin c in it, but it tastes horrible so I don't really recommend it.

The way that generally I cook with it is to use the needles like an herb, in the same way that you might use rosemary. You use the rosemary to flavor a dish but you don't necessarily eat the rosemary itself. Or like a bay leaf. You don't eat the bay leaf itself. The needles have lots and lots of flavor in them. And you know pine nuts come from pine — it's something that people don't ever put together, but yeah, pine nuts are edible.

If you keep your tree, or if you have a tree in your garden, or you have access to Christmas trees growing, you can also eat the fresh shoots that start to grow in the spring. They're like these tiny, almost flower-like shoots, and you can eat those.

And there is a recipe in my cookbook which is for pine ash, or Christmas tree ash. That's basically when you char the tree in your oven, so you blacken it and then blitz it down into a black powder, and that's actually really flavorful. It's very delicious — you just need a tiny bit of it — but it's quite chef-y. It's a bit complicated to do. Some people have had a bit of drama [with] burnt Christmas trees in their oven. But you do end up with this really nice, edible thing. So, in that case, the whole tree is edible really, including the branches.

Have you seen the videos of people kind of freaking out when they realize that pine nuts are from pine cones?

Yeah, like loads of TikToks and stuff. It's like, “I was today year's old when i discovered that.” It's so funny.

How many pine nuts are there in a pine cone?

There's not that many. The reason they're so expensive is because they're incredibly labor intensive to take from the pine cone. I think you get them when the pine cone is green. It wouldn't have dried out yet. It wouldn't be that woody kind of pinecone. And I don't think you get very many of them, like maybe just a handful or a couple of handfuls, you know?

Going back to the ash: What's the flavor profile?

It’s a bit smoky, but also you can really taste that sort of Christmas tree — almost like the smell, which is quite interesting because the needles don't really taste like you imagine them to taste. The needles don't taste like that pine air freshener. You'd assume that they would taste like that but they don't. The ash is a bit more of a florally, quite open flavor.

Is it like juniper at all?

I don’t think so. Spruce has got a very similar flavor profile to vanilla. A compound called coniferin, which comes from Christmas trees, was used for artificial vanilla flavoring in the early 1900s. And then fir — and I think fir is the most common Christmas tree — is very grassy, so it’s not juniper-y at all. And then pine is quite woody, it's a wooden flavor. So it's quite interesting that they don't really taste like these festive flavors.

What's your favorite way to use the ash?

The ash I did quite a lot of [in the book]. I think there's a recipe for vegetables, like ash-baked vegetables. You sprinkle some over your vegetables and then bake them. You can also make a glaze, like a honey-ash glaze for things like that, which works really, really well. So those are the two recipes for ash in the book.

The way that I really like using trees in general is in desserts. I think it works really well. Christmas tree ice cream is probably my favorite recipe from the book, and it's quite easy to make. You basically just make a custard and steep the needles in the custard, and then freeze that.

Do you think that's probably the most approachable way to eat a Christmas tree?

Yeah. I think the Christmas tree ice cream is super approachable, and people seem to have had some really good luck with it. There's the cured fish as well. You know, curing your own fish sounds quite scary, but it seems like one of those recipes that is a bit foolproof. And I think using it in drinks is great.

And ultimately, I haven't invented cooking with Christmas trees. It's been something that's been happening for hundreds and hundreds of years, especially in alpine communities and mountain communities, in drinks. I think to use it in drinks is the most original form of it. It's really, really easy to make your own Christmas tree vodka or Christmas tree cordial.

And there's another drink in the book that's fermented.

Yeah. And that's a juniper drink. In my book, I've given kind of Christmas tree alternatives. As we sort of mentioned, cutting down trees that have been growing for hundreds and hundreds of years is maybe not the most sustainable thing to do. Trees like juniper that are really festive and kind of look like Christmas trees are really fast growing, and they have that lovely festive flavor, so that's why I've included them in the book.

And that particular drink — the reason it works so well is because juniper berries have got lots of yeast on them, so they ferment really, really well. An American lady told me that, because I used to be a baker, and she told me that she made her sourdough starter with juniper berries because they've got so much yeast on them.

Do you have any recipes that make use of sad, dried branches?

Yeah! The drinks are really good for that, but also the vinegar as well. It kind of almost works better, actually, if you have those dried needles. I think that the vinegar and the alcohol, they just draw the flavor out of anything, so it doesn't really matter if your needles are a bit dry.

I have kind of a philosophical question. You say in the intro of the book that you don't expect to save the environment by getting people to eat their Christmas trees. What is the goal with encouraging people to eat their Christmas tree?

I think the best way to answer this is to tell you what my perspective is from running this project for 10 years. I started this project as something really light-hearted, and I thought it was just kind of silly and fun. Then it made me realize how much we waste at Christmastime and, researching further, how many trees get wasted and what that actually means environmentally. Just one year's cohort of trees could capture the same amount of carbon as all of the traffic in the UK for like five years.

It's absolutely huge what leaving one year's worth of Christmas trees globally in the ground could do. So, then it becomes not so silly. Eating is kind of a good leveler. It's kind of like having a debate without really having a debate, in a quite gentle way. I think people understand the world a lot through food because it is something that everybody understands. People have spoken about the climate crisis in terms of veganism or eating animals, and I think it's something maybe not to that scale, because you're never going to survive off a Christmas tree. All of my recipes use a minuscule amount of Christmas tree. You can't make a balanced meal with it.

But it's just starting a conversation. What is this thing that we do? Why do we cut trees down? Why do we keep them in our houses for a month and then get rid of them? And what is the implication of that and why am I at a supper club eating a Christmas tree? What am I supposed to talk about? It's just about starting a conversation and thinking about things in that way.

Quotes have been edited for clarity.
Headshot by Beca B Jones
Recipe photos by Lizzie Mayson

Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest.

And if you're looking for more Milk Street, check out our livestream cooking classes with our favorite chefs, home cooks and friends for global recipes, cooking methods and more.

Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.