Wild Garlic.

Plus a recipe for Tear & Share Wild Garlic Butter Dough Balls.

Welcome to ingredient, where once a month I take a deep dive into some of my favourite seasonal and store cupboard ingredients. This month I’m 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.

Additionally, at the bottom of this post you’ll find my recipe for Tear & Share Wild Garlic Butter Dough Balls (and don’t worry international readers who can’t get their hands on wild garlic, I’ve included the recipe I use out of season for a herby garlic butter too!), a recipe I developed way back in 2020 and I’ve been happily making as a ‘we’ve got guests’ accompaniment to my signature lasagna ever since without ever getting around to sharing it. As a bonus for wild garlic month, my foolproof recipe for a Wild Garlic Quiche is already online on the Macknade website and it’s a keeper - the choice between a store-bought and my homemade food processor pastry (with lard as well as butter to keep it super light and flaky) and a wonderful creme fraiche not single cream filling that doesn’t require any pre-cooking and will serve as the perfect template for any soft herb quiche you fancy as we progress into the summer months.

My Wild Garlic Quiche

Later in the month, I know I want to play around with the relationship between wild garlic and fresh, local seafood, but then after that I’m not sure if I want to so something with lamb, or fresh pasta, gnocchi, chicken or creamy sauces. If you have any preferences, let me know in the comments or hit reply to this email!

To receive these recipes, plus access all of the recipes from past newsletters as well as my Kitchen Cupboards interviews, you can upgrade your subscription here. And, if you fancy exploring the archives for more inspiration, last March we were focusing on Kewpie Mayonnaise: the cult Japanese condiment that has totally eclipsed regular mayonnaise in my kitchen.

Kewpie Mayonnaise.

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This year’s first Wild Garlic haul.

Every year, around the beginning of March, the usual back and forth about recipes, clothes and family dinner plans in my text chat with my mother gets eclipsed by pictures of the ground. Well, not quite the ground: as she passes my go-to patch on her daily walks, she’s tracking the progress of the wild garlic for me ready to drive over and pounce, carrying the bounty back into my cottage kitchen to turn into butters, pestos, risottos and scones.

Here in Kent, the Garden of England, as probably is in the case in most of rural England, foraging opportunities vary as per your exact location. My childhood was filled with blackberry picking for crumbles and then, when I became old enough for sloes, gin. The same such opportunities are all I can access here at the cottage: I have to drive to my parents new home on the North Downs for the scent of wild garlic to overwhelm me as I pass through the narrow, winding lanes with my car windows open to catch the first few warm breezes of the year.

Honestly, I think wild garlic is one of the easiest things to forage because even if you’re unsure about the characteristic shape of the long, smooth, pointed green leaves, you’ll always know you’ve successfully found a patch of wild garlic because of it’s smell. As long as you have permission to be on the land, it is absolutely free to cut and take home wild garlic leaves: it is only illegal to pull it up by it’s roots (but as ever, be responsible when foraging and always leave some for both the next person, and the local wildlife!)

If you want it in your garden and you know your soil is suited to it because there are good foraging opportunities nearby bulbs can be purchased for at home cultivation (my parents are giving it a go right now in fact) but do be warned it likes to spread and is apparently quite tricky to get rid of if the experiment does not work out!

The most abundant of my three wild garlic spots, pictured last April when the leaves are nice and big but before the flowers have appeared. Try not to forage near roads as a general rule as you don’t want car exhaust fumes on your wild garlic (still there even once you’ve washed them) but this road is so rarely used. Also, it’s in a lot worse state than last year, I challenge anyone who does not drive a 4x4 to even get down it right now!

But, if you don’t have the ability, time or locational knowledge to forage for wild garlic (I’m not sharing the location of my multiple patches, though I have offered to take my best friend as she wants her little girl to try the flavour, and because she knows where my parents live all she’d have to do is drive the lanes around the house to find them anyway!) farm shops and food halls around this time also start stocking it from their own foragers: as noted, my friends at Macknade are currently selling it, and my first encounter with wild garlic came in my early twenties when I was writing recipes for Borough Market, using their bounty to make a (sadly no longer online) wickedly pungent spring new potato salad destined to be paired with roast lamb.

And for my American readers? Wild garlic is closely related to your ramps, the leaves of which should work as an easy substitute in most wild garlic recipes.

Last April’s wild garlic.

The wild garlic you’ll be foraging for now will have slightly smaller leaves, and be strong and at it’s most pungent. It will mellow as it grows, sprouting stems with little clusters of white flowers at the top which also have the most wonderful allium flavour: they’re great to use as garnishes and in salads as they start to appear as it gets even warmer.

Tear and Share Wild Garlic Dough Balls

Makes: 9, Preparation time: 35 minutes, plus 3 hours rising time, Cooking time: 18 minutes

As mentioned above, if I want to serve something alongside a lasagna and a simply dressed salad when we’ve got people over for dinner, I make these tear and share garlic butter dough balls. They remained something I made a regular garlic butter for for their first year in my kitchen before it occurred to me to simply melt some of the wild garlic butter I had in the fridge instead of faffing around, and the result went down a storm - and left us all with a slightly less intense case of garlic breath afterwards as an added bonus!

They’re best eaten warm, and the day they’re made so don’t plan for any leftovers.

For the Tear and Share Dough Balls

• 165g plain flour

• 4g instant yeast

• 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

• 1/2 tsp salt

• 120ml tepid water (not quite warm but not quite cold)

• light oil, for shaping

For the Wild Garlic Butter (or if you’ve made this one just melt 35g!)

• 35g unsalted butter

• 10g wild garlic, very finely chopped

• flaky sea salt

For the Herby Garlic Butter

• 35g unsalted butter

• 2 small handfuls fresh parsley or dill (or a mixture of both)

• 1 large garlic clove

• flaky sea salt

1. In a medium to large bowl, combine the flour, yeast, and salt with a fork. Make a well in the middle, and pour in the extra virgin olive oil and the tepid water. Once a uniform dough has formed, cover the bowl with plastic wrap and leave for an hour to rise.

2. The dough should now be wet and airy. Wet one hand under the cold tap, and fold the dough in on itself, turning the bowl as you go, until you’ve formed a smooth ball of dough. My video showing how I make my everyday white sandwich loaf shows this technique quite well. Cover again and leave for another hour.

3. Oil your work surface well (lay down some sort of protection if you have wooden worktops which the oil will soak into!) and using an oiled hand, scoop the dough out of the bowl. Knead it for a minute or two until you’ve knocked out all the air.

4. Oil an approx. 20cm square tin well, making sure to get the oil up the sides.

5. Shape into 9 small dough balls, this visual guide is helpful if you’ve never shaped a bread roll before. Place the dough balls in the prepared tin, and cover again for a final hour of rise.

6. Heat the oven to 200C. Once the oven is up to temperature, bake the dough balls for 18 minutes. Meanwhile, get started on the wild garlic butter.

7. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over a medium heat until frothy. Remove from the heat and add the wild garlic, setting it aside to infuse.

8. If you’re making the regular garlic butter, melt the butter in a small saucepan. Once it is frothy, add the garlic clove, finely grated, stir well and remove from the heat. Finely chop the herbs and set them to one side to stir into the butter just before you pour / brush it over the warm dough balls.

9. Remove the dough balls from the oven and immediately pouring over the wild garlic butter, using a silicone pastry brush to make sure all the dough balls are evenly coated in the butter before scattering over some flaky sea salt.

10. The moment the pan is cool enough to touch, remove the dough balls to a serving board and serve.