Windy fields, wild garlic and unsuitable footwear

Best not to gather blossom in a howling gale

I could smell them before I saw them, lurking down in a damp patch of the field near the stream. I’ve also been resisting the urge to buy them this year as I wanted to find my own patch out here in the countryside. A true treasure of the English springtime, the wild garlic leaf, with its pungent aroma, useful for pretty much anything you might care to put your mind to, whether that be wrapping and steaming fish, saucemaking, a deep green chlorophyll rich paste for beating through a potato purée or shredding into a risotto primavera to give you some ideas. I’ll ferment a few handfuls to use later in the spring and make a green sauce using hazelnuts and smoked oil with the rest of today’s haul. I’ve a new pestle and mortar that I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to christen, (that was kindly given to me along with some other smart kitchenware by the good people at Cole and Mason) and today seemed like the right occasion..

Wild garlic, hazelnut and smoked oil sauce

The unopened flowers, torpedo shaped pointy little shoots that eventually open into a little white bloom, are an interesting addition to the leaf as an ingredient. Those of you who follow my work on IG will know that I like to ferment a lot of the hedgerow ingredients I find. The shoots are simply snipped, then preserved in a brine weighed at a four per cent salt, and then left to work their magic in a Kilner jar for a few months. The flowers that remain in the field will eventually turn to seed, and that’s when I’ll go picking again to collect the flower heads, taking my time to remove the little seeds, salt them using flake sea salt for a few weeks, rinsing and drying, then preserving them in one of my homemade vinegars, which one as yet is unclear as I have quite a good choice.