The Stinky Buds of April

When I wrote this last April I didn’t realise that pickled buds would become trendy – at least, so I am told although I haven’t seen it on any menus. Try it now before the ramsons burst into flower. They are very pungent. Mine are still edible after a year and my 10-year-old grandson loves them. He also eats them raw!

WILD GARLIC pesto is in season but so last year these days. Well, it is for me. Pesto goes with pasta but having been recently diagnosed as diabetic my tortellini days are over, at least for the moment. (I’m in remission now).

There are only so many grilled chops you can smear pesto on, soups to enrich or plates to dot artistically with the emerald green paste when in cheffy mode.

Luckily it’s not just the leaves you can harvest. Everything about wild garlic, or ramsons, is edible, from the flower to its bulb.

I’ve been pickling the buds as a kind of caper, or caper berry because they are around the same size, and have an experimental jar on the go. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I already make capers very successfully from nasturtium seeds and elder buds so am hoping for good results. In fact, I don’t bother buying the real thing these days.

You may look at a swathe of ramsons (of all its folk names I prefer Stinking Jenny) and wonder where the buds are. They turn into the beautiful white star blooms later in the season. Right now they are at the bottom of the plant, among the leaves.

You will have heard of the Darling Buds of May; well these are the Stinky Buds of April!

Pick one and enjoy the crisp, garlicky taste which would make, in moderation, a great addition to salads.

I picked 70g (precisely 101 buds, I counted them), enough for a small jar. Now you can ferment them, apparently, but I stuck to pickling. After a good wash they were packed into the sterilised jar and I made up a pickling vinegar by heating up 250mls of white wine vinegar with bay, peppercorns, mustard seeds, fennel and two tablespoons each of sugar and sea salt, leaving it to infuse before straining and pouring over.

You need to pack them very tightly as they float up and the top layer will not be fully immersed. I found a plastic lid which went neatly inside the jar. I’ll give it a couple of months before trying.

I’ve flavoured vinegar with the flowers in past years and used the broader leaves to wrap soft cheeses stored in oil so it’s a pretty useful plant.

At the end of the season you can also pickle the seed heads when the flower has faded. I might give this a go but have been warned it’s a fiddly job.

You can also eat the roots, using as a mild form of garlic in cooking. My neighbour was digging up a clump in his garden so I took them. Don’t go digging them up in the wild.

Advertisement

Yet another wild garlic recipe!

WHEN the wild garlic appears I go demob happy from winter and high-tail it down to my favourite spot to gather armfuls of it. But there is only so much pesto one couple can consume.

I have a jar in the fridge and more in the freezer and it’s been in soups, as a dressing for new potatoes, inside ravioli, spread on braised pork chops but, as it happens, not very much as a pasta sauce. A few fresh leaves have found their way into tonight’s bubble and squeak.

But I still wanted a few more ideas on what to do with ramsons or Stinking Jenny, by far the best folk name for this short-lived spring green. And I found it in my copy of Katie and Giancarlo Caldesi’s The Gentle Art of Preserving,

It’s a recipe for wild garlic wrapped labneh (a soft cheese) preserved in oil. You can use any soft cheese, or goats cheese or feta, but they made theirs with home made labneh and so did I.

It’s rewarding in itself. Just strain a 500g tub of Greek yoghurt through a double layer of muslin overnight (I used a sterilised jelly bag) and by the morning you’ve got, in my case, 270g of creamy, tangy soft cheese. This needs to be mixed with a teaspoon of sea salt for each 150g and chopped herbs of your choice.

Straining the yoghurt

The next day

Now I gather if you leave it for a day or two the labneh firms up but I’d already picked my ramsons and needed to press on. Don’t select either too small or too big leaves, which will be coarse, but something in between. You will probably need two teaspoons to put a blob of cheese at the bottom of the leaf then roll up towards the pointed end.

I sterilised a Kilner har by boiling it and, when cooled, put a little oil in the bottom. The recipe stipulates extra virgin olive oil but as this was an experiment I used ordinary olive oil. Using tongs, I managed to get the little parcels in without mishap. Then I added a dried chilli and topped up with oil and sealed the jar. I got about nine parcels of varying sizes in.

Normally I’d roadtest* this recipe before blogging but if you fancy having a go you’ll need to collect some ramsons before the season is over. I’ll give them a week in the jar and report back.

* I did. It was excellent.

 

In the woods with Stinking Jenny

[

Wild garlic on the banks of the stream

There was a lovely picture of wild garlic pesto on Twitter the other day from one of the local foodie shops which got my foraging fingers twitching. I go on expeditions to find it several times a year.

There is no need to go far, just a mile away in Endcliffe Park, there are swathes of plants by the edge of the Porter Brook which get trampled on during the Easter Duck Race. But I worry about the dogs getting there before me and go further afield, to Shillito Wood, near Millthorpe.

At first I thought it was too early. I could find very little. It’s still very young (and tender), thrusting itself out of the sodden ground – wild garlic loves the damp – and is not yet in flower. It has brilliant white little edible flowers in the shape of a five pointed star. But it’s a bit like blackberry picking: you spend minutes looking for the first until you get your eye in and they’re everywhere.

For a long time I had the woods to myself. The trees are not yet in leaf but the gorse, Thomas Hardy’s furze, was ablaze with yellow flowers. They say you can make a country wine with the flowers but as you need nine pint glasses of blossoms for every gallon I may pass on that.

Wild garlic has so many names: devil’s garlic, bear’s garlic (its Latin name is allium ursinum), gypsy’s onions, wood garlic, buckrams, Stinking Jenny and ramsons are a few. I like the last two best. Country people welcomed it as winter waned but farmers cursed it if their dairy cows found a patch. It tainted their milk, as Hardy recounts in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It loves the damp and was growing on the banks of tumbling stream which flows into the Barlow Brook.

Wild garlic often grows with bluebells, like the Stinking Jenny still to flower. You cannot confuse the two as garlic leaves are long shiny ovals, bluebells’ spikier. But beware, you might with poisonous lily of the valley. If it has a red stem leave it, wild garlic’s stem is green.

I was planning a soup. Wild garlic makes a gentle pesto (replacing the basil and garlic), very young leaves contribute to a salad and it’s a natural in omelettes. Russians, apparently, preserve the stalks in salt.

The plant was not prolific on my visit and only half grown but that saved separating them from tough stalks later. Collecting them involved a lot of scrambling down banks and there always seemed to be more on the other side of the stream.

I was stopped short by a daffodil seemingly growing right at the water’s edge then realised it was the only one blooming in the wood, a single stem thrust into the stream. But why? Someone had to make a special trip to do this and I wondered at the story behind it: a tribute to a lost loved one or, magically, an offer to the water spirits?

I collected about 10oz of wild garlic and I advise you to wash it several times and pick it over carefully. My recipe called for ‘four big handfuls’ or 200g, so I had that, to a litre of stock, a couple of potatoes and an onion. I replaced the onion with leeks so I had a sort of vichyssoise.

I finely cut the leeks and potato and cooked the gently in oil and butter under a tinfoil ‘blanket’ for about 20 minutes. I added a bay leaf and thyme because I like to fiddle with things. I added the stock (cubes, I’m afraid, as I had none handy) and when the vegetables were soft threw in the greens. Don’t overcook, not more than two minutes, then blitz and season again.

I’ll be honest. The soup wasn’t a terrific success but then it wasn’t a spectacular failure. This blog isn’t going to pretend things always go to plan. Either the recipe needed more wild garlic or less stock, or the plants were a little immature to provide an intenser flavour. But there was an elusive garlickyness

And I’m still wondering about that single daffodil at the water’s edge.