Tag Archives: wild garlic

April 19, 2022 · 1:45 pm

Foraged herb quiche, aka weed pie

This past month the weather has gone from cold (the end of winter), to unseasonably warm (a dash of climate change), to cold again, to just about normal for the time of year. Spring. It is definitely spring. The view from my kitchen sink has turned into a wall of fresh green and red, the latter the leaves of an ornamental cherry. The lawn needs cutting, other than the increasingly large area I’m converting into a wildlife friendly wildflower patch, and it’s dotted with dandelions. It’s very green, as only new growth can be.

There’s a very distinct type of middle-aged man here in Britain who obsesses over his lawns – feeding them, blasting them with chemicals, mowing them into neat stripes. I like some neatness, but the favourite part of my garden these days is the unruly wildflower patch. By June it’ll be full of flowering weeds – wild carrot, salad burnet, wild oregano, greater knapweed, red clover, little daisies, giant daisies, yarrow, fleabane, and many many more (I reckon there are 30-plus species in there now). But now it’s mostly about the dandelions. Some wildlife gardening experts recommend you leave them because, as they flower early, they’re an invaluable food for bees. I struggle a bit with this, as if you like a wildflower patch, dandelions can also take over a bit, spreading their seeds effortlessly, their wide leaf crowns out-competing other species.

So they take a bit of management. Not with toxins, but the occasional digging out. And eating. I’ve just used some of their leaves in this quiche, along with herbs foraged on a walk on Easter Monday. It was one of our favourites routes, taking in Knowlands Wood*, a private wood in East Sussex whose owners allow (respectful) access, which at this time of year is carpeted with wood anemones (Anemonoides nemorosa) and native bluebells (Hyacinthoides non-scripta, not the introduced Hyacinthoides hispanica, which takes over parts of my garden). Then heading for the Spithurst Hub café, with its wonderful selection of Swedish treats – cinnamon, cardamom and vanilla rolls. Love that fika action. Walking back, we even saw our first orchids of the season on an old railway embankment, early purples (Orchis mascula, not edible and not to be picked!).

My friend Alex “Kabak” Marcovitch gets fairly obsessive about the foraging at this time of year, notably going for hogweed (Heracleum sphondylium) shoots. I went for your basic wild garlic (Allium ursinum), which is very easy to over-pick, and indeed I’m still using up a roll of wild garlic butter I made last year and froze, as well as jack-by-the-hedge aka garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata).

When you get your foraged wild herbs there’s always a question of what to do with them. I’d recently noticed I had leftovers of four different types of pastry in the freezer – hot water crust, almond pastry, puff pastry and cream cheese pastry, from a great pie crust recipe by Dan Lepard. I used some of them in an excellent recipe for oat biscuits, which I will share on here at some point. But for the herbs, I decided to make a quiche or pie, using up the cream cheese pastry. I’m not going to give a recipe here for the quiche as it was pretty freeform but here’s Dan pastry.

These quantities make about 750g, which is quite a lot, hence I had some left in the freezer. You’ll need a food processor with a decent capacity. This makes life a lot easier, though you can make it by hand too.

400g plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon fine salt
150g unsalted butter, chilled and cut into cubes
150g full-fat cream cheese
1 egg, beaten

1. Simply combine everything except the egg in a food processor and process until uniform. Alternatively, sieve the dry ingredients into a bowl then rub in the butter and cream cheese.
2. Add the egg and bring to a dough, kneading – but not overkneading – until smooth.
3. Wrap and chill in the fridge, or freeze, until you need it.

So, quiche.  I’ve never much liked quiche. As a vegetarian throughout the nineties and noughties, I was often faced with quiche. Never a nice, homemade quiche, but a deeply dodgy supermarket-industrial quiche that was offered to me as the vegetarian option by people who couldn’t even begin to handle meat-free cooking. Times have changed a lot since then, with the huge rise in vegetarianism and veganism recently, though I expect the supermarkets still sell the same vile quiche, which always seemed to taste just eggy. I know egg is essential for quiche, but the whole idea is you can pack them with flavour to the point where the egg is mainly a binder – not the overall flavour, especially not that that nasty caricature of egg flavour found in industrial food.

Here, I sautéed down a finely sliced onion in some wild garlic butter and oil, added loads of black pepper and a good pinch of ground up dried chillies (the last of last year’s crop) and briefly wilted down the coarsely shredded weeds – about three large handfuls of the garlic, jack and dandelions leaves. Stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) would also be good, but the usual patch in my garden hasn’t appeared this year and I forgot to grab any on our walk. Then I beat three eggs and added some chunks of feta and hard goats cheese, as well as a nice teaspoon or so or za’atar. As I said – somewhat freeform. Combine the egg mix with the weed mix.

Meanwhile, I’d rolled the pastry to about 5mm and lined a flan tin. I pricked the bottom, then baked this blind for about 25 minutes in a 180C oven. When the pastry was slightly browned, I took it out then added the filling, and baked it for another 20 minutes or so, until nicely browned. Garnish with any wild spare wild herb flowers or dandelion petals, and enjoy with a salad.

* If you want to visit Knowlands Wood in East Sussex, not far from the county town of Lewes, this What Three Words is right in the middle. We tend to park in a layby outside Holmansbridge Farm Shop and pick up the public footpath there. It’ll lead you towards the woods, either across a field or via an old railway embankment,, forking around a sewerage works. Otherwise, head to the Spithurst Hub and follow the permissive paths from there, initially along a track into fields populated by ewes and newborn lambs at this time of year. The owners of Knowlands, Nick and Harriet Lear, have managed the 30 hectare woods since the early 1980s as a private nature reserve and their work is really paying off. The birdsong – including nightingale if you’re there at the right time in spring – and butterflies are testament to this.

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April 23, 2021 · 12:08 pm

Wild garlic focaccia

Wild garlic focaccia

When I was a little kid in the 1970s, I was intrigued by the copy of Richard Mabey’s 1972 classic Food for Free on my parents’ bookshelves. But I also loved actual shopping with my mum. I remember walking down the high street of my home city, Winchester, her carrying a wicker basket and us visiting actual grocers, bakers, fishmongers and butchers. But Sainsbury’s had also arrived, and they were soon gone. Put out of business. Times changed.

I loved the supermarket too, fascinated by the variety and such things as hazelnut flavoured Mr Men yogurt. So we weren’t exactly food foragers, but my mum is knowledgeable about plants so could often identify things in hedgerows and woods on family walks. Like most people, we foraged blackberries, but while I did learn that rosehips had been used to make a vitamin-rich syrup during the privations of World War 2, for us at primary school they were more important for crushing up and sticking down the back of other kids’ shirts as itching powder.

Foraging, like baking, is of even more popular these days. And spring is when, among other things, the wild garlic appears. Wild garlic, like blackberries later in the year, is an entry level foraging plant, it’s easy to identify and can be plentiful. We met up with some old friends the other day, for our first pub garden get-together in who knows how long, then took the long way home afterwards. Dom took us to a favoured wild garlic patch, importantly away from the main dog toileting route. A strong garlic flavour is good. A dog wee flavour, not so much.

Wild garlic tends to grow in cool, shady places in deciduous woods and close to streams. Your nose may well help you find it. It’s so pungent, in principle it’s hard to confuse. Though it does grow alongside lords and ladies1 (Arum maculatum), whose young leaves can look similar at a glance but are a very different shape when inspected. And don’t smell of garlic. But they are also toxic, so take care.

Fresh wild garlic - washed

Food for bears
Wild garlic is a wonder. Even its Latin name is great – Allium ursinum, bear garlic. Do bears like it? They’re smart omnivores, so it wouldn’t surprise me. We hunted them to extinction in Britain though, so it’s not something I’ll ever see here. The common name I grew up with for wild garlic is ramsons, which apparently derives from the old English hramsa, and may be related to the Greek krómmyon, meaning onion.

Anyway. We got a lot on that jaunt with Dom and family. I say a lot, but it was actually only two small nappy disposal bags, which were buried at the bottom of our backpack (unused), a legacy of the kids’ younger days.

If you have a lot of wild garlic, you may well need to process it. Years ago, when we still had an airing cupboard, I dried it, but found it lost its flavour. Fresh, it makes a good pesto, whizzed up with nuts, oil, grated parmigiana and seasoning. It’s also good for a simple pasta, just roughly chopped, softened in olive oil and combined, perhaps with a squish of lemon juice. You can also use it to make the Middle Eastern coriander condiment zhoug (thanks to my friend Alex, owner of Middle Easten food business Kabak for that one). Another way to process it was suggested by Dom: wild garlic butter. Just chop the garlic leaves fine, then combine it with softened butter, form into a roll, then freeze in greaseproof paper. You can then cut slices off to cook with, using it in lieu of normal garlic in recipes.

Focaccia variations
This year, I had another thought – wild garlic focaccia. As with every idea, it’s already out there on the internet, but I just used my basic focaccia recipe and added some wild garlic whizzed up in a food processor.

What we know as focaccia in Britain is more specifically Genoese focaccia, a white, somewhat soft tray baked bread containing a decent amount of olive oil. They bake it with salt, olives or herbs like rosemary. I’ve asked one Italian friend if they eat Allium ursinum over there, and he says yes, but not often. Which surprises me, as they have a strong foraging culture there. Even our local market in Rome would sell a misticanza2 of mixed foraged greens – foraged weeds – including dandelion leaves and whatnot. In the 1960 film Two Women / La ciociara, starring Sophia Loren as a shopkeeper who flees WW2 Rome to her native village in the mountains with her daughter, there’s a scene where the villagers are foraging the fields for any misticanza, any greens they can eat to keep starvation at bay.

Anyway, here’s the recipe. Use the basic recipe – with whatever editions you like – at other times of the year when wild garlic isn’t available.

Makes one large, 1kg, loaf

Ingredients
360g water, tepid
6g active dried yeast or 12g fresh yeast
585g strong white bread flour
9g fine sea salt
60g extra virgin olive oil

For the wild garlic paste. (I’m not going to be my usual precise self for this bit, as it’s flexible.)
About 80g wild garlic, a nice big handful
A few glugs of extra virgin olive oil
Good pinch of coarse sea salt
Add some chili flakes if you like some heat

Plus some more extra virgin olive oil

Method
1. Put the water in a mixing bowl (or indeed the bowl of a mixer, if you prefer) and add the yeast. Leave it to froth up.
2. Add the flour, salt and olive oil and bring to a dough.
3. Knead until smooth, by hand or in a mixer.
4. Leave 10 minutes or so and give it another quick knead.
5. Leave half an hour, then stretch into a rectangle and fold into thirds.
6. Leave the dough to prove until doubled in size.
7. Stretch the dough out and put in an oiled baking tray. I use a rectangular enamel one that is 25x35cm, 5cm deep.
8. Leave the dough to rest and prove a bit more, for about 15 minutes.
9. Make the wild garlic paste in a food processor – just squash the leaves in, with a few glugs of extra virgin olive oil and a good pinch coarse sea salt. Whizz it up to a coarse paste.
10. Smear the paste all over the dough, pushing in your fingertips to give the bread its distinctive cratered surface and disperse the garlic.
11. Cover and leave to prove one last time, until doubled in size.


12. Preheat your oven to 220C.
13. Give the bread another drizzle of olive oil then bake for around 20 minutes, until golden.
14. Remove from the oven and drizzle with a bit more olive oil, so the bread is nice and moist.
15. Cool in the tin for 10-20 minutes then remove. Eat warm or later on. All that oil means it stays soft well for a few days.

Like many parents, I struggle to get anything green into my kids’ diets. I’m somewhat baffled by the seemingly innate resistance to any brassicas for example. It’s purple sprouting broccoli season in England now, and that veg is such a delight – sweet, and you’d think child-friendly with its small, tender heads. But no. The kids did, however, love this bread. The big one (increasingly big this year) absolutely scovered3 the stuff.

Wild garlic focaccia

1 Just look at the Wikipedia page for all the wonderful common names for this lily. I grew up calling it lords-and-ladies or cuckoo pint, but there are numerous other names.
2 In Oretta Zanini de Vita’s book The Food of Rome and Lazio, she lists “Arugula [rocket], wild chicory, rampion, salad burnet, wood sorrel, borage, wild endive, poppy greens and other bitter greens” for Misticanza Romana.
3 Our family portmanteau word that derives from “scoffed” and “hoovered”.

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