Sean Sherman Cooks From a Pantry That Predates the Grocery Store

Sherman’s cooking gets filed under heritage, which reverses the order of operations: the first question is not what was eaten here a long time ago, it is what this watershed and this month are producing right now.

The method has two moves and both are repeatable. Subtract the ingredients that arrived through colonial food systems — wheat flour, cane sugar, dairy — and then let a specific region and a specific season fill the space, instead of a shopping list. Sherman’s decolonized restaurant approach runs on that exclusion. The point is not deprivation and the three excluded things are not villains; they entered many Native diets through those systems rather than through ancestral foodways, and for as long as the European-American pantry is treated as neutral, everything it crowds out stays invisible.

Region does the work a recipe usually does

Because the cuisine is tied to particular landscapes, season and ecosystem set the menu before anyone writes a dish: what foraging turns up, what regional producers have, what hunting and fishing traditions allow, which seed varieties exist, what was preserved earlier in the year, what a given month actually offers. The food of the Great Lakes is not interchangeable with the traditions of the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, or the Plains. That is not a decorative caveat, it is the reason a single all-purpose Indigenous pantry list is the wrong unit. There are many food cultures here, each attached to its own land, and flattening them into one look is the failure mode closest at hand.

The ingredients the work draws on: wild rice, corn, beans, squash, berries, maple, sunflower, chili, game, fish, wild greens, mushrooms, nuts, cedar, sumac, and the plants specific to a given place.

The mechanism, on the plate

Take away butter, flour, and sugar and you have removed most of a European-trained cook’s structural tools — the fat that carries flavor, the thickener, the browning agent, the counterweight to acid. Sherman’s kitchen replaces those functions rather than working around a hole. Fire and smoke deepen game, fish, corn, and vegetables, doing what browning in butter would otherwise do. Sumac and berries carry the acidity. Cedar and other botanicals give aromatic structure, the job an herb-and-dairy sauce often holds. Seeds and nuts supply fat and texture, ground or whole. Drying, grinding, fermenting, and preserving concentrate a seasonal ingredient hard enough that it can sit at the center of a plate in a month when it is not growing.

That last one is the most portable idea here and the one I use least. I reach for a lemon because it lives in the refrigerator door, which is a habit and not a decision; dried berries and sumac do the same job with more to say, and I forget they are in the cupboard.

Where the method came from

Sherman is Oglala Lakota, born and raised on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation; his family later moved to Spearfish, South Dakota. He worked in restaurants through high school and college and rose through professional kitchens to executive chef while still young. He also spent time as a field surveyor for the forest service, learning native plants with a depth that later became central to the cooking. That sequence explains why the pantry above reads like botany rather than a trend list: plant knowledge came first, menu second.

Professional kitchens sharpened the question instead of answering it. A menu can travel the entire world and still ignore the foods, agricultural systems, and culinary knowledge Indigenous to North America. So he researched what his ancestors and other Indigenous communities had grown, gathered, hunted, traded, preserved, and cooked before colonial food systems displaced much of that knowledge. The Sioux Chef grew out of that research, then a cookbook, then education projects, restaurant work, and NĀTIFS, the nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, along with the Indigenous Food Lab.

None of that is a recipe-recovery project. The mission takes in Indigenous food access, producer networks, seed and knowledge sovereignty, culinary training, and community economic development — the continuation of living food traditions rather than the curation of past ones. It also points forward: the 2025 book Turtle Island and the 2026 evolution of Owamni into Indígena by Owamni both treat this as cuisine with a future, not a reenactment.

What it does to the American food timeline

This is the part of the work that reaches furthest past his own kitchen. A regional food map that begins at European settlement is already missing part of the map. Corn, beans, squash, wild rice, chili, maple, berries, game, fish, wild plants and sophisticated preservation systems sat inside complex food cultures long before that timeline opens, and those traditions continue, which is why Native foodways are not a preface to American cuisine but part of its foundation. Any discussion of American food that reaches for the word traditional early has not gone back far enough to use it.

That changes the question worth asking. Not what people used to eat, but what knowledge has been ignored, and what changes when it moves back to the center.

What transfers, and what does not

The research order transfers, and it is the most valuable thing on offer. Before the recipe, the region: who grows and gathers here, what the season is actually producing, and who was already feeding themselves here before the current food system arrived. The functional logic transfers too — acid from dried fruit or sumac instead of a reflex citrus, smoke instead of a browned fat, ground seeds instead of a roux. That is a different exercise from the swap tables on our substitutions page, because it starts from what a place has rather than from what a recipe is missing.

The sourcing mostly does not transfer. Foraging, hunting, and fishing depend on access, permission, plant knowledge, and time a weeknight cook does not have, and a restaurant with a producer network can get seed varieties no supermarket carries. The exclusion rule is the easiest part to copy badly: drop wheat, sugar, and dairy from a menu and you have a gluten-free dairy-free menu, which is not what Sherman is doing. The subtraction means something only alongside the place, the sourcing, and the people it is attached to.

The flavors are not a pantry to adopt. His work is explicitly about Indigenous food sovereignty, education, producers, and the continuity of knowledge, so the obligation for a cook outside those communities is to learn names, regions, sources and histories, to credit contemporary Indigenous voices, and to know who is doing the work. The line between studying a cuisine and taking its surface sits exactly there.

Where his authority stops

Sherman is authoritative on his own kitchens, on the food systems NĀTIFS is building, and on the argument about where the American story starts. Nothing in the published work sets him up as a single voice for every nation on the continent, and the distinctions matter in the other direction as well: the Great Lakes, the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, and the Plains hold separate traditions, so a reader interested in one place should be looking for the cooks, producers, and knowledge-holders of that place rather than treating one chef’s menu as the continent’s.

He is also not the person to ask about the repertoire he set aside. A cook who wants to understand how sugar, flour, and butter behave under heat is better served by people who spend their working lives on those variables; the full-length entry in this series on Samin Nosrat is about that kind of fluency, and the rest of Food People Notes & Ideas is organized around which cook is reliable about what. What Sherman’s method hands a cook outside these communities is research discipline, not permission.

If we have described a region, an ingredient, or an institution here inaccurately, the contact page is the way to tell us.

This piece reads a body of published work rather than reporting on it, and it draws on what Sean Sherman has put into print and on air rather than on any conversation; Salty & Clever’s standing note on how we write and check recipes applies. The exclusion of wheat flour, cane sugar, and dairy is described here as his published work frames it, a question about whose food system a pantry assumes rather than a dietary style, and no regional tradition named here stands in for another.

Part of Food People & Ideas.