Wild Garlic

While walking the dogs last night it hit me, that heady, overpowering smell that signals the change of seasons. Wild garlic is one of my favorite ingredients and I'm lucky enough to live next to a bountiful supply of it. Growing on river banks usually under the shade of trees it looks like a fairly unremarkable leaf but the flavour is wonderful. The predominant flavour is, unsurprisingly, garlic, but it's a much sweeter, more complex flavour than a bulb. You can use it anywhere you would use a clove of garlic but, being a leaf, it's more delicate so I'd add it at the end of cooking to preserve as much of the flavour as possible.

One of my favorite things to do with wild garlic is to chop it finely and mix it into some softened butter, seasoned with sea salt and ground black pepper. Then make some bread dough, roll it into balls and stuff a teaspoon full of the butter mix into each roll before baking. This makes the most gorgeous garlic bread, almost like a doughnut! When you bite into the oven-warm bread you get an intense blast of pungent garlic and sharp salt all held together by rich butter. If you don't want to make your own bread you can just spread the garlic butter on any bread and warm it in the oven, or those "bake-at-home" baguettes work pretty well.

Another idea is to make a kind of pesto, substituting walnuts for pine nuts. Shred the wild garlic leaves and mix with some rock salt, black pepper, walnut pieces, maybe some parmesan and lemon zest if you fancy it. Then using a pestle and mortar grind it to a rough paste before loosening the mixture with some good olive oil. You can stir this mixture through pasta, or serve it with fish (try adding some capers if you want to serve it with fish), or any other use you can think of for pesto!

If you want a simple use for wild garlic try throwing a couple of leaves in with a salad to give a bit more bite, or wilt it in butter with a grating of nutmeg, like you would with spinach. For something more complex what about a wild garlic panna cotta?

The wild garlic season lasts from around the end of March to the end of May, towards the end of the season the plants sprout little white flowers which are also edible, they are intensely "garlicky" and can be used as a garnish. It really is a fabulous ingredient and best of all it's free. Every year, for me, it marks the beginning of spring and the time of the year where I really start getting inspired by food.