Foraging: Wild Garlic

Wild garlic (Allium Vineale), along with wild onion (Allium Canadense), is one of the earliest harbingers of spring. I've been getting interested in learning more about foods we can forage here in Southwestern Ohio, and spring is prime foraging time. So I walked out to the boggy semi-wooded area of my back yard today. Sure enough, there were numerous clumps of wild garlic. You probably have some in your yard, too. They're easiest to see this time of year before you've started mowing, as they start growing before the grass does. They prefer wet areas at the edge of woods, so look under trees and wherever the ground tends to get marshy in the spring.

Growing, wild onion and wild garlic look very much alike in the early spring. According to the Michigan State Extension Service, wild garlic leaves are round and hollow and attach to the lower half of the stem. Wild onion leaves are flat, not hollow, and attach at the bulb.

It was helpful we've had so much rain recently, as in Cincinnati's heavy clay I'd've had a hard time harvesting these if the soil hadn't been waterlogged. I managed to pull up three clumps whole with bulbs covered in wet-clay mud, but one clump came up just leaves and no bulbs. But that's fine, there's plenty of flavor in the leaves, too. These are best in early spring, from mid-March to mid-April, while the tops are tender.

Cleaning these things is a royal pain. Mud, leaves, sticks, worms. Don't clean them in the In-Sink-Erator side of your sink. Trust me on this. But the hassle is worth it: you've just foraged a food from your backyard. How cool is that? And even cooler, this is a food that undoubtedly your great-times-five-hundred-grandmother was foraging in early spring 10,000 years ago as a member of some hunter-gatherer tribe. Now that's a traditional food! So turn on some music and get ready to stand at the sink for a while. Gx500Grandma rinsed them squatting by a snowmelt-fed stream. Kwitcherbitchin.

Here's what wild garlic looks like with most of the mud washed off but not yet trimmed. In my heavy clay this early in the year, the bulb ends haven't gotten very big. If you have a looser loam, you might get nice big bulbs, especially if you're harvesting in late April.

You can see the light brown hulls remaining on many of the bulbs. These slip off fairly easily -- soaking in warm water helps with the stubborn ones -- and then you just pinch off the roots between your fingers.

Here's what they look like trimmed and ready to use in a recipe. At this point, you can wrap them loosely in a damp paper towel and stick them into a plastic bag in the fridge for a couple of days, just like chives or other fresh herbs.










Wild garlic can be substituted for fresh chives (in which case you can just snip off the tops instead of pulling them and skip all the cleaning!) or for shallots, making its early appearance a boon to cooks trying to eat locally. However, it's not easy to find recipes specifying wild garlic. Most of what you find instead are recipes for ramps, one of the most prized of spring's foraged foods, which are called wild garlic in the UK. However, I did find one wild garlic recipe in The African-American Heritage Cookbook. I've adapted it here:

WILD GARLIC WITH BACON AND EGGS
Serves 1

1 slice bacon, diced
1/4 c wild garlic, chopped
2 eggs, beaten
1/4 t salt
1/8 t pepper

In a hot pan, saute bacon until nearly crisp. Stir in garlic and let cook until bacon is crisp. Stir in eggs and seasonings and fry, stirring, until eggs are done to your taste. Serve immediately.

UPDATE: Thanks to commenter Carol, I learned that there's a lookalike, False Garlic/Crow Poison (Nothoscordum Bivalve) that blooms much longer (the true allium blooms only for a short time) and doesn't have the onion/garlic smell. It looks like this.