Wild garlic, or Ransomes, grows like the weed it is, proliferates all over the shop, and fills the air with the most gorgeous, pungent, garlickly deliciousness. Heaven for garlic lovers, hell for vampires. Wild garlic is one of the first properly useful plants to come up in the spring, so it’s a real treat for the forager. I’m quite new to the joys of foraging, so I’ve not quite got to the stage of gnawing on twigs and eating stuff so bitter it sucks all the moisture out of your mouth but doesn’t quite kill you. But oh! How I love to forage for tasty stuff!
Wild garlic bulbs are small and fiddly, so it’s the leaves you want - which is rather handy, ecologically speaking, as you can pick more or less as many as you want without harming the colony. Whereas digging up bulbs - always a major no-no. Wild garlic is a really easy “in” into foraging for bits and bobs. It’s easily identifiable by eye and nose, and it’s a completely familiar flavour.
You can do all sorts of things with the leaves. You can slice them lengthways into ribbons and use them in a stir-fry, or crossways to use as a herb in salads or any dish requiring garlic. A lovely thing to do is take a fillet of sea-bass or loin of cod and wrap it, together with a slice of lemon and a bit of seasoning, in whole garlic leaves then bake in the oven. You get a lovely subtle garlic flavour. A great thing to do, however, when you’ve gone berserk and picked loads and are not sure what to do with it (the Forager’s Conundrum), is make it into garlic butter.
For 250g of butter (I’d always use salted, but that’s just me) take 20-25 garlic leaves. Wash and thoroughly dry the leaves then roll into cigars and slice across the grain. If you haven’t got a garlic leaf in front of you, that may sound confusing, but don’t worry, it’ll make sense when you do!
Place butter, at room temperature, into a large bowl and mash in about 1/4 of the garlic leaves, using a fork. Once it’s all moving about nicely and has a nice texture, mash in the rest. You don’t want to obliterate the leaves, so don’t be too heavy handed, but it does need to be nicely mixed together.
Once it’s all evenly mixed, take a sheet of clingfilm and place on a cool surface. Spoon the butter onto the clingfilm, in a line just above the bottom edge. Bring the bottom edge of clingfilm up over the butter and roll into a rough cylinder. Roll to and fro to get a good shape going, then take hold of the loose clingfilm at each end and roll the butter away from you, so that the ends roll up like a sweetie wrapper, and you’re left with a nice fat sausage of garlic butter.
You can store this in the fridge for a few weeks.
It is delicious tossed into freshly cooked pasta and topped with crispy lardons and toasted pine-nuts, stuffed into chicken breasts, or just spread on hot toast.
Sounds great!
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