Recipes Using Wild Garlic Flowers

The short wild-garlic season is underway. From salads to sauces and soups, here’s how to get the best from the bulb’s less pungent cousin

W ild garlic usually begins proliferating, in veg boxes, at farmers’ markets and on the forest floor, from now until the start of June – not so much a season as a brief window of opportunity. This year, it is reported to have come earlier than usual – which means it will be gone again before you know it.

Wild garlic – AKA ramsons, or ramps, or bear’s garlic – is expensive to buy but free to forage. It grows in dense green carpets, if you know where to look. But you also want to make sure you’re picking the right thing: the leaves of wild garlic are easily mistaken for lily of the valley, which is more poisonous than it sounds, and also dog’s mercury, which is about as poisonous. Neither of these smell or taste like garlic (dog’s mercury apparently smells foul) so it should be easy to distinguish, but they tend to grow in the same shady spots. If you’re not careful, you may gather up a few stray leaves of the wrong sort.

Wild Thing: The Best Ways To Cook With Wild Garlic

Let’s assume you have secured a safe and reliable supply – now what? How many ways can you eat wild garlic? The answer is: a lot more than 17, but here are 17 to be getting on with.

Wild garlic is considerably less pungent than ordinary bulb garlic, but you can use it as a substitute, as long as you bear in mind that the more subtle flavour won’t survive any prolonged cooking. This can, of course, be a virtue – nothing you make with wild garlic takes long. For that reason the simplest treatments are usually the best, and the simplest of all is to steam the washed, still-wet leaves in a little butter, as Nigel Slater does, to accompany lamb. For another option, he roasts lamb fillets smeared in wild garlic leaf butter.

Obviously you don’t have to cook wild garlic at all: the raw leaves can be chopped into salads, and it makes an excellent pesto. Tamal Ray pounds wild garlic with sunflower seeds, olive oil, parmesan and a bit of lemon, but there are hundreds of other variations out there – different cheeses, seeds and proportions – so no matter what you experiment with, you’re probably approximating somebody’s recipe.

Wild Garlic Uses In Cooking Where Is My Spoon

A picada is a classic Catalan sauce made from nuts, chilli, breadcrumbs, olive oil and, in the case of Thomasina Mier’s clam recipe, wild garlic. As both a green leaf and a garlic stand-in, wild garlic can also find a role in other traditional sauces, including salsa verde and chimichurri.

Wild garlic is also a common soup ingredient: a warming bowl for those days when the season and the weather refuse to match up. This reader’s recipe for bärlauch (German for wild garlic) soup is perhaps the most elemental: stock, a shallot, butter, cream. With additions including carrots, celery and pasta, Claire Thomson’s wild garlic and orzo minestrone is a bit more substantial, perhaps best saved for an even colder day.

Angela Hartnett’s wild garlic, courgette and mint soup contains a slightly optimistic hint of early summer, while wild garlic and nettle soup occupies the fuzzy middle ground between foraging for food and eating weeds. The white garlic flowers make a nice garnish for any soup, although it may be a bit early in the season for them yet.

My French Country Home Magazine » Recipe: French Style Peas With Wild Garlic

Yotam Ottolenghi makes wild garlic and quinoa cakes, binding them together with eggs, cheddar, cottage cheese and breadcrumbs. Fried in batches for three minutes a side, they can be served with either a wedge of lemon or with a salbitxada sauce. Gill Meller’s wild garlic, potato and chorizo tortilla is an easy breakfast or lunch to make from things you already have, whenever some wild garlic happens to come your way.

The same goes for this channa dal with wild garlic puree. You’ll need a few spices for this one – cumin, chilli and turmeric – but you’ll still be doing the bulk of your foraging in your own store cupboard.

Rosie Sykes’ toasted linguine with wild garlic is another good use for the wilted leaves, provided you can get your head around the idea of toasting pasta – baking the dry linguine in the oven before you boil it. Honestly, it’s completely normal.

How To Forage For Wild Garlic, A Delicious Spring Green

Jane Baxter’s wet and wild garlic risotto deploys three kinds of garlic: the wild kind, the regular kind and the new season’s “wet” garlic. Blanche Vaughan’s chicken with wild garlic involves a straightforward marinade made from wild garlic and yoghurt, although it does require you to spatchcock the chicken first. Fortunately this is one of the easiest – and handiest – butchery techniques: pick up a stout pair of kitchen scissors and copy this instructional video.

Finally the Hairy Bikers present their wild garlic cornbread. I know I claimed at the outset that the fragile flavour of wild garlic wouldn’t stand much cooking, and baking it into some bread would appear to violate that principle, but I’ll let the Hairy Bikers worry about that. In any case, half the wild garlic specified in the recipe is reserved for garlic butter applied directly before serving, so they appear to be hedging their bets. If you were to use all of the garlic in the butter and add none to the bread, I’d wager that would work too.If you go down to the woods today…you may not yet be able to picnic, but could be greeted by the heady aroma, emerald-green leaves, and starry white flowers of wild garlic. Also known as ramsons, this delicious leaf is a wonderful ingredient for springtime meals.

An ancient woodland indicator, it likes shady damp spots and is commonly found across the UK. Long-known in folk medicine as being good for health especially after a long winter, it is reputed toboost the immune system.

Wild Garlic Biscuits

If you are tempted to go foraging for the first time, please do get someone to show you or read our guide on how to forage sustainably – the young leaves of other inedible plants can grow nearby. Make sure the wild garlic is washed well, as it’s grown and picked where the wild things are! It is also good to forage responsibly so that the plants can regenerate, growing back year after year.Eatweeds.co.ukand thewoodlandtrust.org.ukhave helpful guides.

Some simple ways to enjoy are to whip up a speedywild garlic pesto– a little goes a long way, and it freezes well too.Flavoured butteris easy to make, and very versatile on anything from the humble jacket spud to roast chicken.

Wild garlic saltis a great way to capture the fresh flavour of this early spring delicacy, and once made, it can be stored for several months. Use as a finishing garnish on a whole host of dishes, from dips and freshly baked breads, to platters of roasted seasonal veg.

Forage For Wild Garlic

This risotto pairs wild garlic with sweet roasted squash and creamy rice, adding in another woodland flavour with crunchy, mellow toasted hazelnuts. If you like, keep the skin on the squash; it is so thin you can eat it as it softens well as it roasts.See the full recipe here.

This is Riverford’s veg hack star James Evans’ favourite way to cook wild garlic. It may sound complicated to make your own wild garlic infused gnocchi from scratch, but it’s actually very simple and only uses a few ingredients. It’s delicious if you fry the gnocchi in some butter to brown them and serve with some herbs.

A fantastic brunch or light dinner, thesepotato and wild garlic cakes are served simplywith watercress salad. Alongside them add a super quick carrot and apple chutney; sweet, tangy, flavoured with honey, cider, and warming spices, it may just become your new favourite condiment.Find the full recipe here.

Wild Garlic Facts And Health Benefits

Coconut broth is used to cook nutty tasting wild rice and quinoa, witha seasonal pairing of wild garlic and purple sprouting broccoli: two of our favourite homegrown spring vegetables.Chickpeas also add extra protein to this hearty vegan dish.You can see the full recipe here.

Like a risotto, thisis a dish of rice plumped with a flavourful stock and a splash of wild garlic.The fundamental difference is that you should leave a paella to cook relatively untouched. In an ideal world it will form a golden crust in the bottom of the pan as the liquid absorbs. The simple salad brings bright, sweet citrus and salty, tangy olives to the party. What’s not to love?Find the full recipe here.

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Ingredient Focus: What Is Wild Garlic?

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