San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Green garlic is the star in bright, light pasta
Vegetable-centric dish gets a boost from crispy pancetta and lemony ricotta, bringing fresh vibes for spring
Hands down, my favorite spring vegetable is green garlic. Which makes it wild to me that so many seem to not even be familiar with this spring bounty.
Unlike asparagus or peas, it is really more of a farmers market or specialty item. It’s the young, tender bulbs and stalks of the drier, white bulbs of garlic you find year-round at any grocery store. How do they differ? Well, green garlic is enjoyable from stalk to bulb. You can chop all of it up, like in this week’s pasta recipe. You could also cut it into chunks and simmer in olive oil, rendering the garlic super suave to top on toast with canned sardines or as an incredible condiment with grilled steak.
Unlike regular garlic, you can use a ton of it. Instead of an accent ingredient, it becomes a main part of the meal like any other vegetable. That’s in part because it’s also much milder than older garlic, which can get a little too pungent and a bit curmudgeonly at the end of its yearly cycle. Basically, think of green garlic as the complete opposite of that bag of peeled garlic, festering, vacuum-packed and waiting to attack your nostrils. Green garlic is pure and it can only do good.
It does especially good in a pasta with other spring vegetables like sweet snap peas. I like to saute the garlic with butter and olive oil for complex richness and add snap peas to cut it with freshness. For an umami and salty bite, pancetta is also nice in the mix.
To go deeper into the spring vibes, I toss in fresh herbs. (A mix of whatever you have is truly OK.) Lemon juice brings brightness, and a big dollop of seasoned ricotta ties it all together with its luscious mouthfeel. When I say seasoned, I mean simply, too, with just a little lemon zest, salt and maybe some olive oil to, again, add some complexity to the richness. Each bite ends up being this just-garlicky-enough tangle of sweet, crisp, rich, salty, lemony and creamy. It’s everything I want in spring pasta.