Spring Green Garlic:Growing It, Cooking With It, Loving It

Surprise Gourmet Food Right Under My Hoes

Last week I received an email from Catherine at Albion Cooks saying that she had just made my Savory Cheese & Scallion Scones again, 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 growing instructions at Veggie Gardening Tips, a little bit of history and a photo plus a recipe at In Praise Of Sardines. And in the March 30th edition of The Ladybug Letter, there was yet another beautiful photo, along with numerous ways to use green garlic and several recipes, including green garlic mayonnaise, green garlic soup, and step-by-step photos of how to make green garlic pesto. This stuff is everywhere. (And those are just the ones I remembered.)

So what is it, and how had I lived this long in ignorance of 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. 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/small farmer's dream crop, as you can grow it in what would otherwise be unused space--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. An added bonus is that it is ready to sell when not many other things are, bringing in much needed income.

Diehard kitchen gardener and self-declared 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. But what's really embarrassing is that I excel at planting everything too closely together (onions, beets, lettuce, tomatoes, you name it)--except garlic. I'd never, ever 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, Trader Joe's 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 is garlic, but it is not. It is the essence of garlic, the epitome of spring. It is seasonal eating at its very best.

Farmgirl's Green Garlic Fettuccine
Cook your choice of pasta according to package directions (I add a splash of olive oil and a sprinkle 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. I used the white and light green parts plus about an inch of the leaves of three stalks (for one serving). 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 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 real mashed potatoes.

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 a couple of months at least. But I'm not letting that stop me. I figure my fall planted garlic still has at least 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. (At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the best planting days left this month according to the moonsigns are tomorrow and Friday.)

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? You can even grow green garlic in a flower pot or bucket--just fill it with soil and/or compost and poke the cloves in about an inch. So what are you waiting for? Grab the garlic and get planting. And be sure to let me know if our plan works out.

Note: This is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging #29, a deliciously informative event hosted by Kalyn's Kitchen. Food bloggers from around the world participate, and you never know what interesting new edibles you'll discover each week in the Sunday night roundup. And because garlic is so incredibly good for you (in any form), this also fits right in with ARF/5-A-Day. Catch it every Tuesday night at Sweetnicks.