Glass Noodle Salad with Wild Garlic & Prawns.
A light, customisable, Vietnamese-inspired noodle salad that celebrates wilted wild garlic as we head into salad season.
This month on ingredient we’re focusing on Wild Garlic: the mildly scented green-leaf allium that is gradually carpeting the woodland and roadsides up and down the country as we hurtle into spring.
You can already find the recipe for my Tear & Share Wild Garlic Butter Dough Balls here, and I plan to have my final wild garlic recipe with you all over the next few days… I just have to go and forage some more as I’ve worked through the entirety of my first bagful already!
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As wild garlic month here on ingredient continues, as usual I’ve been cooking around my cookbook collection to see how others have been treating my chosen ingredient, and today’s designed for sharing, wild garlic featuring salad is inspired by a dinner using almost the same ingredients I made the other week, but given (almost) completely different treatments.
As part of her March menu in volume II of The Food Almanac London based, Vietnamese author Uyen Luu opens with a warm recipe for Wild Garlic and Prawn Noodles made with giant, head on prawns, plenty of aromatics and a sauce that comes together with a splash of either aloe vera or coconut water (a smart tip for hot glass noodle dishes I’m filing away for later!) Served piled into a bowl with lots of fresh lime it made a lovely supper that really captured what she’d described in her headnote that “these noodles offer warmth, freshness, lightness - all things that describe the start of spring.” But as I was eating them, my mind kept on wandering to another way I could serve glass noodles, as a salad with a punchy dressing, light protein, but keeping the element of wilted wild garlic used in abundance in place of this sort of salad’s usual fresh herbs.
I don’t think wilted wild garlic gets enough credit: usually we seem to want to capture the heat of it’s garlic nature, in pestos, butters, oils and the like (or else infuse it in cream), but as a wilted green it is often overlooked. By wilting the wild garlic you’re mellowing it’s garlic flavour (but don’t worry, it is still defiantly there!) and making it suitable for similar treatments as you’d give other spring greens such as early spinach and chard.
I love in this salad it actually forms the milder backbone to the other two alliums that are in play: very slightly caramelised shallots which provide texture and sweetness, and shredded spring onions for astringency and crunch.
A Few Substitutions
As much as I dislike the type of food website that provides endless lists of substitutions for every single recipe (we recipe developers write our recipes in a certain way for a reason, people!) this particular salad is well suited to a few changes to protein to suit availability and dietary choices, and a few ‘what can I use instead of the wild garlic’ options for those of you who can’t find this wild leaf in your country.
Proteins: My choice of plump, juicy cooked king prawns here is literally because I did not have time to drive down to my fishmongers on the beach (I spent my morning shifting furniture ahead of new carpets arriving!): if I had, I would have topped this with scallops. If I’d seared them and added them hot to the cool salad, or simply sliced them to mingle with the lime-heavy dressing ceviche style will have depended on my mood once I was home. If you don’t eat shellfish for whatever reason, leftover slices of rare roast beef or steak would be my pick, and if you avoid animal products entirely, caramelised pieces of crisped tofu.
Wild Garlic: In the introduction to the recipe this salad was inspired by, Uyen writes: “If you can’t get wild garlic or garlic chives, use extra garlic… or substitute coriander or Thai basil leaves.” These are all good suggestions: I’d recommend softening 2-3 sliced cloves (depending on if yours are small or fat) along with the chilli and stirring through plenty of fresh herbs when you’re bringing the salad together ready to be piled onto a serving platter.
Glass Noodle Salad with Wild Garlic & Prawns
Serves: 2, Preparation time: 15 minutes, Cooking time: 20 minutes
This easily scalable, Vietnamese-inspired salad is all about layering colours, flavours and textures, all served together in a naturally elegant muddle atop a serving platter. Whilst I’ve shared a few protein and wild garlic substitution ideas above, the key to this salad working is both in it’s simplicity and in taking the time to treat the ingredients properly so they all work in harmony: in lightly caramelising the shallots, in wilting the wild garlic, in soaking the spring onions to remove some of their astringency and to improve their texture and crunch, and in making sure you use the freshest limes possible for the dressing.