Fermented Wild Garlic Pesto
It’s that time of year again. The days are getting longer, the nights aren’t quite as perishing, and for those of us daft enough to brave the mud, the woodlands are starting to fill with the beautiful aromatics of wild garlic, Spring is coming. It’s a truly exciting time of year for anybody who is passionate about seasonal food, as for a lot of us it marks the beginning of the foraging calendar. Famous for it’s delicately pungent, sweet grassy flavour and peppery bite, wild garlic (also known as Allium ursinum, ramsons, buckrams, broad-leaved garlic, wood garlic, bear leek or bear's garlic) is a bulbous perennial flowering plant in the amaryllis family Amaryllidaceae. It is native to Europe and Asia and grows primarily in moist woodland, but can also be found beside riverbanks with ample tree cover.
In Wales, my favourite wild garlic patches tend to start appearing in the first week of March and have developed to a nice, foragable size by March 20th. By mid Spring most wild garlic has begun to flower but this too is a blessing as both leaves and flowers are edible. The flowers themselves are beautifully delicate and white and make for a wonderful addition to any salad, or for the more adventurous amongst you, can be candied, preserved or even fermented. Growing up to 20-30 cm, wild garlic spreads by rhizomes and self-seeding, and over time can form colonies that cover entire woodland floors. It is one of the best sights to behold in the world of foraging! To stand in the middle of a naturally occurring field of food is as breathtaking as discovering a circle of mushrooms.
Our Wild Garlic Adventure
Our first foraging foray of the year followed a morning of stop-start work in the office. Huw, restlessly struggled with writing, whilst I began work on the SEOs of this website. It was a cloudy morning and motivation was lacking, made worse when the clouds soon gave way to a beautiful blue sky. Never one to waste an opportunity to get my hands on food, I flippantly suggested we give up on office work and instead head off to the woods for a 20 minute walk to where I knew a reliable patch of wild garlic grew each year. It was exactly what Huw had been waiting to hear, a chance to escape and get outside with a camera.
On the walk there we spoke about little other than all the ways we loved to eat wild garlic. From a basil substitute on pizza, to a baby spinach substitute with much more flavour, to pestos and lacto-ferments, the ideas just kept rolling. I can’t remember who first said the word pesto, but it was enough to stop the conversation when the word ‘fermented’ was adding to it. Wild garlic pesto is nothing new, but it’s a staple most foragers are familiar with for the sheer easy and brilliance of it. But neither of us had tried a fermented version. I’m quite familiar with the lacto-ferment process, having made kimchi, fermented regular garlic and a long list of various fermented vegetables, but we’d never taken the final step and made a full blown pesto out of it. My mouth watered as I imagined the delicate balance of wild garlic’s natural grassy sweetness and the fermented sour tang. We had our heading.
When we reached the edge of the woodland the wind dropped away as we were greeted by a small ocean of wild garlic and its aromatic embrace. We set about filling our bag with the beautifully tender leaves, and quickly gathered enough for our recipe. After a couple of arty photos for the blog post, we set off on the walk home again, which was all downhill towards where the sun began it’s decent into the sea.
Foraging Wild Garlic
As always, never take more than you need, never pick a protected species, never trespass, and always respect the natural habitat. If you plan to follow our recipe for wild garlic pesto then you’ll need to pick one average carrier bag (500g) to make two large jars of pesto. Generally speaking, if you have found a patch of wild garlic, others will know of it too, and it’s important to leave enough for everyone as well as not to damage the plants by removing too much.
One of the main attractions in foraging is the wonderful flavours we find in plants and fungi that have grown in their natural habitat and far from the destructive and artificial environments of conventional agriculture. Having said this, harmful chemicals can still find their way into faragable ingredients that grow close to roads. For this reason, I tend to leave anything growing at the side of the road or footpath alone in favour of that which grows in the heart of a habitat.
The next point is a word of warning that accompanies all foraging; be careful of dangerous lookalikes. In the case of wild garlic, be careful not to pick the leaves of Lily of the Valley (Convallaria majalis). They favour the same conditions and look similar, but Lily of the Valley is a little more upright and doesn’t share the distinct aroma of wild garlic. When flowering, it looks more like a Snowdrop, with small, bell-shaped flowers hanging from a slender stalk. This plant is highly poisonous and can cause anything from digestive issues to irregular heartbeats. Another thing to bare in mind is Ivy. A lot of woodland is covered in Ivy and often wild garlic pushes it’s way up amongst vines of Ivy. It is easy to accidentally pick Ivy that is hiding beneath the leaves of wild garlic, so be careful when washing your haul for any signs of dark green Ivy leaves.
Preparing ingredients for fermentation
When embarking on a wild ferment such as this, it is highly important that we do everything we can to encourage the cultures we need and discourage any harmful or dangerous pathogens.
Firstly, thoroughly wash your wild garlic in salted water, then lift it out and into a colander to air dry. The salt kills off any unwanted intruders and the water washes off any dirt and detritus that may still be clinging to the leaves. The reason you should lift the garlic out of the water and not tip it all into the colander is because the aforementioned dirt sinks. If you lift the wild garlic out of the bowl then you will leave the dirt floating around in the bottom. If you tip it out then it gets caught in amongst the Wild Garlic again.
Sterilize your equipment with alcohol or boiling water and allow it to steam dry. Be careful with any glass jars you might be using as boiling water can cause untreated glass to shatter.
When salting your ingredients, use non-iodized salt. Iodine inhibits the growth of beneficial bacteria in vegetable fermentation.
Use a clean weight to keep the ingredients below the fermenting brine. Any part that breaks the surface is exposed to the environment and can become home to harmful or unwanted pathogens.
A word of caution; when done correctly, fermentation is a perfectly safe and enjoyable process, but you are working with ‘live ammo’. This means that, through no fault of your own things can go wrong. You can essentially just get unlucky. If you see black or blue mold growing, then throw away your ferment. If it smells bad but there are no signs of spoilage, throw it away. (I’m referring to an unexpected bad smell, as a lot of ferments have a pleasantly funky smell). It is always better to be safe than sorry.
After you have prepared by washing all your ingredients and sterilizing your equipment, please move on to the recipe section of this blog post for a step-by-step how to on making wild garlic pesto.
Basic Wild Garlic Pesto Recipe
500g of wild garlic, washed.
A thumb of ginger root, peeled and diced.
Salt.
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed.
150g olive oil (or more if you’d prefer a smoother pesto).
2 jars with loose fitting lids.
(Optional: a handful of parsley or nettles if you have any in the garden. If your pesto doesn’t have enough of an acidic tang then add lemon zest).
Let me begin by adding this prefix to the recipe; you can add whatever you would like to this pesto. I have chosen to add toasted almonds and a pinch of salt to the finished pesto when served and not blend them into the pesto itself before hand. This also applies for anybody who wishes to add parmesan. Alternatively, blend some toasted pumpkin seeds with yeast flakes and sprinkle over the pesto when served. Feel free to try it blended into your pesto if you wish, but I have not tried this so cannot vouch for how the wild cultures will respond to such ingredients.
Step 1.
Having washed your wild garlic and sterilized your jars and equipment, begin by peeling and finely dicing your ginger root. Set a jar on your scales and tare the weigh to 0, then pack it with 250g of the wild garlic, making sure to mix the ginger root and garlic clove in amongst it in even layers.
Without taring the scales again, fill the jar with enough water to cover the ingredients and check the total weight of the ingredients and water. Whatever the weight, divide by 100 and times by 3 to find out how much salt you will need to add (this recipe follows the general rule of a 3% salt ratio).
Now tip some of the water back out into a sterilized bowl and add your required amount of salt. Stir it well and make sure it is all dissolved, then tip it back into your jar and make sure it is well mixed in to distribute the salt evenly.
Repeat for the second jar.
Step 2.
Loosely fit the jar’s lid in place and leave it somewhere ambient and out of direct sunlight. Once or twice each day, unscrew the lid of the jar to ‘burp’ the ferment and release the buildup of gasses. Do this for 3 days minimum, until you notice small bubbles appear in the fermenting liquor. At this point, using a clean fork, fish out a piece of wild garlic and taste some to see if the ferment is suitably tangy enough for your taste. If not, continue to ferment it for up to a week/10 days.
When the ferment meets a level of acidity you find satisfactory, move the jar into your fridge and leave it to chill for 24 hours.
Now you can do one of two things with it. Firstly, you can eat it as it is. When left whole, the fermented wild garlic can fulfill the role of a mild and delicate kimchi in most recipes, or make a beautiful side dish in it’s own right. Alternatively, you can fish out all the solid ingredients (leaving the fermenting brine in the jar) and blend them with olive oil. Add the oil gradually as you blend in order to control how smooth or coarse you want your pesto. Personally, I prefer a little texture as the fermentation process has a lovely way of softening ingredients but still leaving them with a freshness and crunch.
A note on seasoning. If you feel your pesto isn’t as tasty as you’d like, this is usually down to seasoning. Add a pinch or two more salt which will balance the acidity of the ferment and smoothness of the olive oil.
Step 3.
If kept in an airtight jar in your fridge, this pesto will keep for a month minimum. Generally speaking, I keep lacto-fermented vegetables such as these for up to 3 months without issue. You will notice that as they age, flavours become more mellow and complex.
I hope you enjoy your pesto!
Alternative cooking suggestions
If you have more wild garlic than you know what to do with, here are some ideas for simple and tasty ways to add it into your every day meals.
Check out our recipe for steamed wild garlic with roasted purple sprouting broccoli and rose harissa potato.
Gently fold it into a soup or stew at the end of cooking for a fresh and garlicky kick.
Substitute it for Basil on a pizza for a seasonal alternative (place on the pizza after cooking as the steam is enough to soften the tender leaves).
Blend it with salt, pepper, nuts and olive oil to make a seasonal pesto.
Blend it into a pasta dough for a super tasty ravioli.
Blend it and mix into butter or olive oil for a super tasty cooking medium.
Wild garlic tends to pair well with ingredients that come into season at the same time. Try using it to flavour dishes containing purple sprouting broccoli, asparagus, Jersey Royals or morel mushrooms. The leaves and flowers also work wonderfully with simple risottos and salads.