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Preparing
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Wild garlic
Allium ursinum · Allium
40 pairings
Wild garlic (Allium ursinum), also called ramsons, bear's garlic, buckrams or wood garlic, is a broad-leaved bulbous allium that carpets damp deciduous woodland across Europe and western Asia each spring. Its lush, lance-shaped green leaves and starry white flowers smell and taste strongly of garlic — softer, greener and more grassy than the cultivated clove — and are gathered as one of the great wild flavours of the European spring, blitzed into pesto and soups or stirred raw through eggs, potatoes and butter.
Picking a good onedrag
Stiff, deep green, pre-flowerYellow, limp, gone to seed
Market freshThe all-rounder: pesto, butter, soup, wilted greens.Everyday best
Leaf bladeGreen, the edges just starting to pale
Lift a leafBends over, then slowly lifts again
Stalks and budsTight green buds among the leaves
Smell over the bunchGarlic clear, over a clean grassy note
What to look for, from stiff, deep green, pre-flower to yellow, limp, gone to seed.
Keeping ittap a band
A domestic fridge holds it about 6× longer than the counter.
Humidity
95-100%
Near-saturated, 95-100%: a bag with damp paper, or the cut stalks stood in water. These broad thin leaves flag within a day in dry fridge air.
Airflow
Perforated bag, not sealed
Perforated, never sealed: shut tight the leaves sweat and slime where they overlap; open to the room they wilt and go papery.
Yellows beside apples
It makes almost none itself, but like other leaf alliums it should yellow beside apples, pears and bananas - the chlorophyll goes first, and the green leaf is the whole point.