Dear Seafoodies
I hope you'll forgive me for being back in touch so soon after my last broadcast but time is against us! The wild garlic season is not a lengthy one (and nor is this newsletter, phew!) and anyone who has been keeping an eye on me will know that it is one of my favourite culinary seasons of the year!
Appearing mainly in April and May, wild garlic typically coincides with the arrival inshore of cuttlefish on the south coast. These two ingredients pair sensationally but wild garlic, being a softer, mellower garlic flavour than the bulb variety, works incredibly well in a whole host of seafood creations. In many cases it is just a matter of making a substitution for the bulb garlic in a recipe, but other times it may be that wild garlic just simply is the ideal ingredient.
Unfortunately wild garlic is not, to my knowledge, available in any supermarkets. It may possibly be available in some greengrocers (I'd love to hear from you if it is in your local one), but is currently very much available in farmers' markets (where it gets eagerly snapped up), veg-box schemes and where it comes from, the woods. There's one stall in the Bute Street farmers' market who make their own wild garlic pasta at this time of year.
Personally, I am very lucky to have my friends Sam and Ginny who live in Devon and whose nearby woods are literally carpeted with the stuff. They kindly pick and send me 500g bags of the leaves in the post for which I'm very grateful. Over the last two seasons, and with the current one still in progress, I've accumulated quite a few recipes using wild garlic, from pasta dishes and omelettes to stir-fries and seafood dishes. Here are some of the latter, images left-to-right, top-to-bottom:
