Wild 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
