WiLD abOUT GaRLiC!
Potent in pesto, magic with mayo, brilliant with butter – and now’s the perfect time to pick your own
it is knuckling up all over the country now in moist, shady places – a swelling carpet of green, in woods and dells, classically on riverbanks, and you will likely be first alerted to its presence by the sweet, oniony scent.
Lush and prolific, wild garlic is readily foraged and, frankly, is much nicer at this time of year than real garlic, which from March to July isn’t much cop. And it’s an old, old herb with many quaint names – bear leek, bear’s garlic, buckrams and (most widely) ransoms.
It grows in abundance, often covering the forest floor; it first sprouts in March and blooms in mid-spring – and every part of the plant is edible.
Once you get your eye in, you can harvest with confidence – but, until you do, crush a shoot first and take a good sniff. the allium reek of all the garlic and onion family is unmistakable – if you don’t get that pong, then you may have pulled up some lily of the valley by mistake, which you really do not want to eat.
Of course, you should only pick from areas where wild garlic grows in abundance – and preferably not from patches frequently trampled by people and their dogs, or close to very busy roads.
Like all traditional herbs, wild garlic is prized across Europe for averred medical properties. It’s reputed to lower cholesterol, reduce high blood pressure and may to some degree be an antibiotic. Boiled in water, the resulting liquid is said to be repugnant to cats, which might be useful if you prefer to watch songbirds in your garden.
OddLy, the taste of wild garlic is much less pungent than its aioli aroma might make you think. the shoots should be brushed clean and washed in cold water before use and, raw and finely chopped, can be used – with discretion – for a splendid potato salad with the first Jersey royals.
the trick with any potato salad is to dress the little tubers while they are still warm after boiling or steaming – with a slick of olive oil, some mayonnaise, a scatter of finely chopped wild garlic and seasoning to taste.
there are two other superlative culinary uses. For one, the plant makes a magnificent garlic butter. take a typical 250g pack of soft unsalted butter and blend well with 50g of chopped wild garlic and some flaky sea salt, before rolling it into a sort of cracker with greaseproof paper and chilling.
you can cut slices at a time as you need it, it can be frozen for up to a month, and kids love it on toast. But Michelin-starred chef tommy Banks – an ardent fan of wild garlic who describes it as an ‘integral part’ of his restaurant menus – has broader advice.
‘We use the fresh leaves and flowers first, then pickle the seeds to be used like garlicky capers,’ says Banks. ‘don’t be put off by the potency: wash the leaves thoroughly and plunge them into boiling water to blanch, and they become more subtle.’
His go-to recipe is for wild garlic oil, ‘great in mayonnaise, pesto or for simply dipping bread’.
you take a kilogram of the leaves, pulse them in a food processor till roughly chopped and squeeze them in a cloth to remove as much moisture as possible.
then you return them to the food processor with 300ml of oil – olive, rapeseed or even vegetable is fine – and blitz the lot for three minutes, before returning to your cloth or jelly bag over a bowl and leaving the oil to drip through. It will keep in the freezer for a year.
the other classic is wild garlic pesto. you rinse and roughly chop 150g of wild garlic leaves before blending them to a rough paste with 50g of parmesan, one clove of garlic proper, the zest of half a lemon and 50g of pine nuts. then, the motor running slowly, you add most of 150ml of rapeseed oil and a few squeezes of lemon juice, before tasting and seasoning.
Poured into a jar and topped with the remaining oil, your pesto will keep in the fridge for a fortnight and make any pasta sing.
So there you have three easy, classic dishes. Otherwise, let your imagination run riot. Add wild garlic to a ragù, toss a handful into a stir-fry, explore its affinity with pork chops, mashed potato, or roast lamb – or even a simple soup.
MORE adventurously, Susannah Stone of tain, Easter Ross, resorted to wild garlic to outmanoeuvre the Scottish Milk Marketing Board back in the 1970s.
It is hard to credit, but until the 1990s the price of milk, and the distribution of related dairy products, was heavily regulated by this branch of officialdom. When Mrs Stone offered them her homemade crowdie – a traditional Highland
cream cheese – they refused to have anything to do with it.
But, when she started selling it herself and they saw how it was flying off the shelves, the Milk Marketing Board launched its own competing and, needless to say, inferior crowdie.
Susannah Stone did not get mad: she got even. She began harvesting wild garlic and introduced a crowdie flavoured with it, sensibly figuring that the suits of the Milk Marketing Board were most unlikely to go foraging in the Scottish woods themselves.
today, Highland Fine Cheeses is a long-established concern and Susannah’s son, Jamie, found it a grand launching pad for his career as a Liberal democrat politician.
His mum was something of a pioneer because, really, it is only since about 2010 that the British as a whole discovered wild garlic. It began to feature on menus; thousands got into foraging and soon discovered its superiority, through the months of spring, to last autumn’s staling garlic cloves.
A big factor was the financial crash of 2008, which quickly impacted how we eat. Millions of us started to shop daily, rather than weekly; grasped that it is cheaper, tastier – and scarcely less convenient – to cook a meal from scratch than to microwave an E number-clotted tV dinner.
We now waste much less food and eat out less frequently, which is why the casual dining sector has been toiling in recent years.
And a lot of us took up foraging, be it for nettle soup, bramble jelly, the first tender beech leaves for a salad, or wild sorrel, which makes a lovely delicate soup.
One should draw sensible lines: unless you are accompanied by an expert, I wouldn’t risk searching for wild mushrooms. But wild garlic is another matter. the internet is full of recipes – so skip boldly into the woods with that basket.