The Joys of Wild Garlic

All about wild garlic: your new favourite herb

Known officially as ‘Allium Ursinum’ and colloquially as bear’s garlic, wood garlic and ‘ramsons’, the wild garlic plant is a delicious free addition to the larder at this time of year. You can find them growing all over the country, especially in woodlands and by roadsides, and even in parts of London!

They have shiny, dark green leaves shaped like a pointed oval and, as the season progresses, beautiful, star-like white flowers. More importantly, however, they smell very strongly of onions – you’ll be able to locate them in the woods just by following their smell.

Unlike domestic or cultivated garlic, wild garlic leaves are much more widely used than its roots or bulbs, as these are much smaller than those of cultivated garlic. However, the whole plant is edible, so if you want to give the roots a go then do! The flowers are also edible and look wonderful sprinkled onto salad.

How to pick

When you’re picking, try to leave some buds so that the plant can reproduce, and there’ll be some around for you next year! If you’re after the leaves, pinch the leaf off at the stem, leaving the root in the ground if you can – the leaves will often grow back a second time if you leave them enough stem.

When I picked my lot a few days ago, the buds were sprouting but hadn’t yet flowered (they look a bit like pointy seed pods). These ‘pods’ are absolutely delicious pan-fried in butter and olive oil and sprinkled with a little salt – crispy and soft, and tasting mildly of roast garlic. I thoroughly recommend you pick some if you’re out and about.

You need to take a little care when picking wild garlic as there are a few plants that look similar but aren’t edible, notably Lily of the Valley. There’s freely available advice on the internet about telling them apart, but the main clue is the smell – you’ll notice an oniony scent anywhere where wild garlic grows, and it’s really pungent when you crush a leaf between your fingers. Don’t worry: it doesn’t taste nearly as strong as it smells! In addition, the flowers of Lily of the Valley are bell-shaped, rather like snowdrops, and its leaves grow from one central stem, whereas wild garlic leaves each grow individually on one stem.

Eating it

The younger leaves of wild garlic are best for salads, as they’re a little more tender. When picking, you’ll sometimes find them towards the edge of a cluster, or underneath the larger, older leaves. They’re also wonderful chopped into ribbons and added towards the end of a stir-fry, especially with some julienne of ginger. You can add the younger roots to stir-fries as well – treat them a bit like spring onion. Don’t leave out the older leaves – they’re great for soup, since you’ll be pureeing it anyway, and you can also blanche them in some boiling salted water until they wilt and eat them a bit like spinach.

So that’s old leaves, young leaves, roots, flowers, buds; soup, salad, stir-fries, blanched leaves, pan-fried buds. You can even make wild garlic pesto (no joke – the recipe’s below). This could well be the most useful plant in the universe. Now cook with it!

Wild Garlic Soup

Ingredients

Knob of butter

1 large onion

1 large potato

Medium-sized mixing bowl full of wild garlic leaves

50ml white wine

1 litre chicken stock – preferably homemade, but stock cubes are fine

2 tbs crème fraiche or cream

Salt and pepper

Method

Roughly chop the onion and potato and wash the garlic leaves well. Sweat the onion in the butter until it’s translucent and soft, then add the potato and sweat for another minute or so.

Deglaze the pan with the white wine (just pour it in and scrape the yummy bits off the bottom), and let it reduce to a light syrup, then add the chicken stock and let it simmer for 20 minutes or until the potato is well cooked through.

Once the potato is cooked through, add the garlic leaves and cook for another two minutes once they’ve wilted. Purée the soup until it is a consistent colour and texture, then add the crème fraiche or cream if you’re using it, and stir it in well. Taste it, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Then pour into a lovely big bowl and enjoy!

As a garnish, you have a few lovely options. You can set aside a few leaves of garlic, and slice these into really thin strips to top each bowl, with a spoonful of cream. Or you can make up a little bowl of pesto from the recipe below and serve the soup with a blob swirled in. Again, this looks fantastic with a bit of cream swirled in too!

Wild Garlic Pesto

Ingredients

A couple of large handfuls of wild garlic

1 small shallot

50-60g hard, salty cheese such as parmesan

50-60g pine nuts or shelled, peeled walnuts

80 ml olive oil, plus enough to cover the pesto in the jam jar

½ tsp salt and ½ tsp pepper

1 tsp sugar

Method

Wash and thoroughly dry the garlic leaves, grate the cheese, and very roughly chop the shallot and nuts. If you need to peel the walnuts, blanche them for a few minutes in rapidly boiling water and try to peel them while they're hot: it's a fiddly job at the best of times, but this makes it a little easier.

Pulse the nuts and shallot in the food processor until broken up somewhat, then add the garlic leaves and oil and continue to pulse until the garlic is chopped up very small and a consistent texture is achieved.

Fold the cheese into the mixture, then season to taste with salt, pepper and sugar. Pour it into clean jam jars, then top up with oil until the pesto is totally covered (this is important to keep it fresh and green).

Keep your pesto in the fridge; it’s at its best up to a week after making it. It’s great with meat, particularly chicken and sausages; with soft, mild cheeses or salads; and with the soup recipe above. It’s also yummy on pasta!

A final note: I've just looked out of my kitchen window into the crummy, bin-filled yard that counts as my garden, and guess what's growing in all the corners? You got it: wild garlic. It's probably closer than you think!

A Breakfast Treat for Easter Morning

Easter is on the way, and I’ve been searching high and low for the ideal egg dish to kick off my Sunday morning. Lately I’ve grown rather tired of the high street obsession with the chocolate egg. This tradition originates in the pagan fertility festivals which were present before Christianity’s Easter celebrations replaced them. Even the name ‘Easter’ is supposed to stem from ‘Eostre’, the Old English name for a fertility goddess. While an egg may look hard and dead, new life always lurks within, making them representative of fertility and resurrection and a convenient symbol both for the Christian resurrection myth and pagan springtime celebrations. Nothing says ‘springtime’ quite like a fresh egg, and for me, a chocolate one just doesn’t quite say it loudly enough.

Like many of us, I used to start Easter Sunday with an enormous pile of chocolate eggs. Then I graduated to fresh ones, hard-boiled with onion skins to dye them mottled brown, and finally to the very peak of eggy perfection – the four-and-a-half-minute soft boil, with just a sprinkling of salt in the yolk. But was it true perfection? This year I wanted to find out. Not for me the soft-boiled egg of former years; I’m out for something new. And I think I might have found it.

Known in French as ‘oeufs en cocotte’, or ‘eggs in a pot’ this simple dish is an absolute winner for a luxury breakfast or lunch dish. In its basic form, an oeuf en cocotte is made simply by cracking an egg into a buttered ramekin or similar small dish, popping a knob of butter on top, and cooking it in a bain marie for around 15 minutes in a hot oven. Remove the bain marie from the equation and you’ve got a baked egg – a British version of the French classic.

As usual at PDKTC, I’m fascinated with the number of possible variations on this basic theme. You can replace the butter with milk or cream or even (I’m told) tomato ketchup! You can line the ramekin with anything from slices of ham, bacon or salmon to tomato ragu, pan-fried asparagus or cooked aubergine. The flavour variations are pretty much infinite – any combination of herbs or spices can be blended with the butter, milk or cream to seep their way into the egg as it cooks.

The recipe I’ve given below is an utterly luxurious smoked salmon and cream version which will go down a storm on Easter morning. Like all baked egg recipes, though, at its heart it’s ludicrously simple as well as infallibly impressive. Whether you’re showing off to your parents or getting in some brownie points with your other half, I thoroughly recommend an oeuf en cocotte this Eastertide! As usual, have fun and experiment. Who knows, maybe the chocolate eggs will have to wait until lunchtime this year...

Oeufs en cocotte with smoked salmon and cream

Ingredients

Per ramekin:

Butter

2 slices smoked salmon

1 egg

1 tablespoon double cream

A good sprinkling of parmesan

Salt and pepper

Method

Pre-heat your oven to 180°C.

Butter the ramekin and line it with a layer of smoked salmon all over. Try to get it round about in line with the edges, but don’t worry too much if it overlaps slightly – the salmon shrinks a bit as it cooks.

Slightly season the salmon, then carefully crack in the egg. Try not to break the yolk, but don’t worry too much if you do!

Spoon over the cream until the egg is pretty much covered – it takes around a tablespoon for my ramekins, but it depends on the size you use. Sprinkle over a good amount of finely grated parmesan, and some more salt and pepper. Go a bit easy on the salt, because there’s a lot in the parmesan already.

Boil a kettle while you set out your ramekins in a high-sided baking tray or large saucepan. Pop it in the oven, and pour in the water until it reaches around halfway up the ramekin. Don’t overfill it, or bizarrely the egg will take a lot longer to cook!

Close up the oven and leave it to cook for 15-18 minutes, depending on how well-done you like your egg. The egg will look a bit wobbly even when it’s fully cooked because of the liquid cream. The cheese on top should be golden-brown and bubbly.

Serve with a slice of hot, buttery toast for breakfast, or some salad and crusty bread for a delicious light lunch.

Enjoy, and have a very, very Happy Easter!

Vinaigrettes with Verve

Spring is sprung! The last week’s sunshine has really kick-started salad season for me – quick and easy, prefect for a hot day, and best of all, you can tailor it to your craving of the moment. Salad leaves, pulses, rice or pasta, nuts, meat, fish, and a whole rainbow of vegetables – the choice of salad ingredients is almost endless. But for me what really sets the seal on a great salad is the dressing. Forget those sad shop-bought ones with their added lecithin and MSG: give me a home-crafted vinaigrette any day. Once you have the technique mastered it takes all of ten seconds, and with as many potential ingredients for the vinaigrette as there are for the salad itself, you can really stamp some personality on your very own house dressing. 

All about emulsions...

In essence, a simple vinaigrette is the most basic of all salad dressings: it’s an emulsion of oil and vinegar, seasoned with salt. An emulsion is essentially a mixture of two substances which don’t ordinarily mix, such as oil and water. The mixture of these substances is achieved by agitating them (if you whisk together oil and water, for example, they will eventually mix). As you whisk together the oil and vinegar when making your vinaigrette, the vinegar is broken up into tiny droplets which are suspended in the oil. Because vinegar is water-based, it doesn’t like being mixed with oil and will try to run together into larger droplets, and eventually one big pool of vinegar. This is what’s happening when you leave your vinaigrette for a while and it begins to separate. Luckily though, all that’s needed turn it back into a full emulsion is a bit of whisking or a good shake.

Why we love mustard

I like to keep my vinaigrettes in a sealed container like a bottle or jam jar, so that I can shake them up just before using them and don’t have to worry about them splitting. Another way of keeping your vinaigrettes emulsified for longer is to add a stabilizer. This essentially keeps the vinegar suspended in the oil for longer before it starts to separate, leading to a longer-lasting dressing. A commonly used commercial stabiliser is lethicin, which is also found naturally in egg yolks – that’s the reason why mayonnaise, which is also an emulsion, doesn’t split as quickly as vinaigrette.

However, a much better stabiliser to use in your dressing is mustard, which holds it together just long enough for you to linger lovingly over your salad, but not so long that it never splits at all (a trait of commercially-made dressings which I’ve always found faintly sinister). I’ve included mustard in the recipe below because its stabilising properties are useful and I love the flavour it brings to my dressings. However, you can leave it out if you like without causing yourself too many problems. 

Some other things

I’ve given a really basic recipe for vinaigrette here, which makes enough to fill your bottle or small jar and cover your salads for weeks to come. Then underneath, there’s a whole list of yummy things to add to this base mixture, to make the vinaigrette your own. Please note that if you keep your vinaigrette in the fridge the oil will solidify after an hour or two: just leave it at room temperature for a bit before you next use it. The amount of oil and vinegar in the dressing should mean it’s pretty safe from bacteria even if you keep it at room temperature – the oil stops them from getting any oxygen and the acidic pH of the vinegar kills them too. Hooray!

Basic Vinaigrette

Makes 400ml

Ingredients

100ml white wine vinegar

300ml oil (Olive oil or a neutral oil such as rapeseed)

1 tsp Mustard or mustard powder

Salt and pepper

Method

Whisk the mustard into the vinegar and add a sprinkling of salt and pepper. Very slowly pour the oil into the vinegar mixture, whisking hard all the time to emulsify the oil into the dressing. The finished dressing should all be the same thick texture and all the oil should be fully incorporated. Once it’s done, taste it and adjust the seasoning to your liking. Then pour over a lovely salad and enjoy!

NB: for a ‘split’ vinaigrette, one in which the oil is not fully emulsified with the vinegar, just pop all the ingredients in a bowl and give a few cursory blows with your whisk. Unlike a split hollandaise, a split vinaigrette is still delicious.

Lovely things to add to your vinaigrette

Balsamic vinegar: Add a teaspoon or two to the white wine vinegar base.

Chilli: Can be used in a thousand ways. Raw or cooked in a little oil; with seeds or without; added to the finished dressing or used to infuse the oil (see below). Using the seeds will make your vinaigrette spicier. Try using rice vinegar as a base, a mixture of equal parts sesame and rapeseed for the oil, and finishing with chilli and lime juice for an Asian-inspired dressing.

Chopped herbs: Parsley, chives and tarragon all add their own distinctive flavour and are lovely used separately or mixed. They’re great when the salad is accompanying steak or grilled chicken. Coriander gives a fresh flavour and goes well with chicken or fish dishes. Dill is of course brilliant with fish, especially salmon. Basil is just generally yummy, and great with some chopped tomato in a ‘split’ dressing (see below). Use fresh herbs (dried ones taste of nothing, except possibly dead grass) and you can add them when you mix the vinegar and mustard or stir them in at the end.

Chopped nuts: Walnuts, hazelnuts, pine nuts...the list is endless. Chop ‘em up and throw ‘em in. Especially good when used in conjunction with the corresponding nut oil (see below).

Chopped tomato: If you’re feeling finicky you can peel it first: cut a cross in the bottom and drop the whole tomato into boiling water for ten seconds, then drop it into cold water. The skin should peel right off. Cut the tomato into quarters, scoop out the seeds, and dice what’s left. Then stir it gently into your dressing. Also nice in a ‘split dressing’.

Flavoured oils: Nut oils such as walnut or hazelnut work very well and are popular in French cuisine. They are made by pressing the natural oil from the nut itself, so you can’t really make your own. Truffle oil, however, is made by infusing a neutral oil with truffle pieces, which you can do yourself if you can source the truffles. You can infuse any oil with herbs; add a sprig or two, heat it gently and leave it in a warm place for an hour or two. Chilli works here too.

Flavoured vinegars: The most common here is raspberry, but if you look around a bit you can find hundreds. You can also make your own by adding a sprig of your favourite herb or some crushed fruit to a standard store-bought white wine vinegar and sealing it tightly for a week or so. Just replace the white wine vinegar in the recipe with the flavoured vinegar of your choice.

Garlic: Crush one clove well (if you sprinkle it with table salt it’ll puree more easily under your knife) and add to the dressing to taste. For a deeper but milder flavour, cut the bottom off a whole head of garlic, wrap it in tinfoil and roast it for half an hour. Then squeeze out all the little cloves, pop them through a sieve, and stir the resulting yummy goo into your finished vinaigrette.

Honey and grainy mustard: Pretty simple really. Use a good squirt of runny honey and a good-quality wholegrain mustard instead of the plain one. Add to the vinegar when you start the dressing.

Lemon juice: Use instead of vinegar (with equal parts lemon juice to oil rather than 1:3) or add a squeeze to your finished dressing. Lovely with parsley, especially if you add a sprinkling of pine nuts to your salad. Also makes a lovely ‘split dressing’.

Shallots: Chop a few very finely and sweat them gently until they’re soft and translucent, or leave them raw for a sharper flavour. Stir them into the dressing at the end.

Sherry or cider vinegar: Use instead of white wine vinegar for a more refined flavour.

All the ingredients listed above can be combined in hundreds of different ways, and they’re only the beginning. Mix your favourites, add a few new ones, and really get creative. Salads will never be the same again!