Young volunteer garlic: surprise gourmet food right under my hoes.
2013 Update: Love garlic? It's easy to grow, even in containers. Learn How To Grow Your Own Garlic here.
Last week I received an email from Catherine at Albion Cooks saying that she had just made another batch of my Savory Cheese & Scallion Scones, but this time she substituted cheddar and green garlic for the feta cheese and scallions.
Green garlic? A quick pop over to her site revealed a lovely photo of the item in question, a delicious looking batch of scones, and the nagging feeling that I'd just read about green garlic somewhere else. But where? Oh, wait. Everywhere.
There were green garlic growing instructions from Veggie Gardening Tips. Then the little bit of green garlic history and a great photo, along with a recipe for Catalan-Style White Bean and Green Garlic Tortilla at In Praise Of Sardines.
Mariquita Farm had another beautiful photo of green garlic, along with numerous tips on ways to use green garlic, plus several green garlic recipes, including green garlic mayonnaise, green garlic soup, and step-by-step photos of how to make green garlic pesto.
This stuff really is everywhere. And those are just the ones I remembered.
So what is green garlic, and how had I lived this long without knowing about it? Green garlic, also known as spring garlic, young garlic, baby garlic, and garlic shoots, is, claims Catherine, "a culinary secret." It is "immature garlic that hasn't yet developed its garlic bulb and has a much milder flavor than the mature bulbs, yet still has that distinct garlic flavor."
What do you do with green garlic? "It can be used in any recipe in place of regular garlic or leeks, and can be used raw or cooked." And, obviously, it can take the place of scallions, too.
Green garlic is also a market gardener and small farmer's (and backyard gardener's!) dream crop, as you can grow it in what would otherwise be unused space.
More below. . .
Green garlic season starts as early as February in places with mild winters and can last through June in some areas. Look for green garlic at farmers' markets, in your CSA subscription box, or try growing some yourself.
How do you grow green garlic? You simply plant your fall garlic twice as thickly as you normally would, and then harvest up half of it as baby garlic in the spring. How brilliant is that? An added bonus for farmers is that it's ready to sell when not many other things are, bringing in much needed income.
You can also plant your garlic cloves in the late winter or very early spring, and if you're growing it specifically to harvest as baby garlic, you can space them as close as one inch apart.
Diehard kitchen gardener and foodie that I am, it's bad enough that I'd never heard of eating baby garlic until now. For years I've even swiped some of the first tender garlic leaves from my plants and tossed them into spring salads, although I've since learned that doing this could be detrimental to the garlic bulb.
But what's really embarrassing is that I excel at planting everything too close together—onions, beets, lettuce, tomatoes, you name it—except garlic. I'd never thought about doing that.
But the good news is that a quick tour of my garden revealed something wonderful: I have ready-to-eat, volunteer green garlic all over the place.
It's even growing in the pathways between the raised beds.
Naturally I immediately tried some. I sprinkled it on a salad and stirred it into my special green scrambled eggs. But the delicate, subtle flavor was buried. I wanted to taste this culinary secret without anything else in the way. So I turned to my favorite simple comfort food indulgence: pasta with butter and cheese.
In a perfect world, I would have made my own pasta from scratch. On days full of digging in the garden and tending little lambs, a box of organic Italian fettuccine works just fine.
As the pasta was simmering, I stole my first taste of the lightly cooked, buttery green garlic and let out an involuntary little moan. This stuff is beyond good. It's garlic, but it's not. It is the essence of garlic, the epitome of spring. It is seasonal eating at its very best.
Freshly harvested and prepped garlic ready for cooking.
The green garlic pictured above is on the mature side. I've never seen green garlic for sale here in rural Missouri, but in this photo and this one, the bulbs haven't started forming, and it bears a closer resemblance to scallions or baby leeks. Spring green garlic is edible at any stage.
After 17 years, this Korean Style Hand Plow, also called an EZ Digger, is still my favorite all around gardening tool, and the only thing I use to dig up garlic. I own two because I lost one once and went immediately crazy without it, then found it a year later. I use them for everything from weeding to seeding. Lately I've had my eye on this long handled version.
Farmgirl Susan's Easy Green Garlic Fettuccine
Cook your choice of pasta according to package directions. I add a splash of olive oil and a heavy dose of salt to the water.
Meanwhile, heat a lump of butter in a skillet. Finely chop as much green garlic as you like (warning: it shrinks down) and add it to the pan of butter. For one serving, I used the white and light green parts plus an inch or two of the leaves of three stalks.
Many people just use the white and light green parts, like with leeks, but using some of the green part gives you more green garlic, and I thought it tasted great.
Cook on low heat until softened, about five minutes or so. Add a splash of pasta water, cover, and turn off heat while pasta finishes cooking. Stir the drained pasta into green garlic mixture, along with another lump of butter and plenty of freshly grated Pecorino Romano (or Asiago or Parmesan). Salt and pepper to taste.
Garnish with more grated cheese and a few finely chopped garlic leaves if desired, and serve it up quickly—or risk finding yourself standing in the kitchen with fork and empty bowl in hand and a very confused look on your face.
Other Ideas: I think this buttery green garlic would also be wonderful mixed with boiled red new potatoes, stirred into some rice, or sprinkled over mashed potatoes.
Update: It also tastes great on pizza!
After two nights in a row of devouring this delectable dish, I now of course want lots more green garlic—and I don't plan on waiting a whole year for it, though I'll definitely be double planting my garlic this fall.
I realize—and you probably have by now, too—that everybody is already harvesting and eating their spring green garlic crop.
We pretty much missed planting time by at least a couple of months. But I'm not letting that stop me. I figure my fall planted garlic still has about two more months to go, so I assume that means favorable growing conditions for baby garlic, too.
Here's the plan: I'm sticking individual cloves of garlic (about an inch into the ground, pointy side up, one to two inches apart) in every nook and cranny of the garden I can find: between the rows of onions where the lettuce and beets did a no-show, in a circle around each tomato plant, in the bare spots in the strawberry bed.
If you're gardening by the moon signs, the best time to plant garlic is in the third quarter. For more about gardening with the moon, I recommend Astrological Gardening: The Ancient Wisdom of Successful Planting and Harvesting by the Stars by Louise Riotte, who is best known for her .
We're talking about half an hour of effort at the most. After that, garlic is practically a no maintenance crop. Pests ignore it—in fact it's used as a natural pest repellent—which means you're also doing your garden a favor by putting it everywhere. Just mulch to keep away the weeds and water regularly.
That's it. And this is a perfect way to use up those sprouting heads of garlic you probably have hanging around (unsprouted cloves work great, too).
No garden? No problem. You can even grow green garlic in a flower pot or a bucket: just fill your container with soil and/or compost and poke the cloves in about an inch deep and an inch apart.
So what are you waiting for? Grab the garlic and get planting. And be sure to let me know if our plan works out.
Need something to eat while you're waiting for the garlic to grow? You'll find links to all my sweet and savory Less Fuss, More Flavor recipes in the Farmgirl Fare Recipe Index.
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FarmgirlFare.com, the spring green foodie farm blog where garlic breath is a happy fact of life.
