Wild Garlic Chinese (Scallion) Pancakes.
Changing up the alliums in this street food classic classic (with step-by-step photos!)
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 my perfectly sharable for the long weekend recipe for a Vietnamese-style Glass Noodle Salad with Wild Garlic & Prawns here.
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We all know that wild garlic works so brilliantly in places where at any other time of the year we’d usually use bulb garlic, but I think we also don’t spend enough time thinking of it’s allium-like nature. As we tend to enjoy garlic flavour as just that, a flavour rather than a texture, we don’t consider what other alliums we could substitute with wild garlic come the season.
Which is why I’m super excited today to bring you a deceptively simple recipe for Chinese Scallion Pancakes (Cong You Bing) made with wild garlic, rather than finely sliced / chopped spring onions with a delicious accompanying dipping sauce that will work with practically any allium that does not need pre-cooking filling from wild garlic to garlic chives, from regular chives to ramsons. Or even a combination of whatever you can forage / find in the garden / source from the fridge.
Before I’d made them for the first time, I thought making these Chinese-style pancakes would be tricky to master with all those laminated layers: I was thinking it might be like making Korean kimchi pancakes which took me a while to get right, and even longer to write a more mass-market version with plain flour and cornflour for BBC Food. Even worse, was it going to be like the dreaded from scratch puff I made on my pastry course?
But honestly, all you need to make these is some flour, boiling water, toasted sesame oil, a pinch of salt and your choice of filling - plus some cooking oil and a rolling pin. They make a great starter or side, and I’ve even included some step-by-step photos below for the shaping and rolling if that is something you’re still unsure about. I think they’ll make a fun yet super simple kitchen project to indulge in over the long weekend, especially as the weather is supposed to be a total wash out!
Chinese-style Wild Garlic Pancakes
Serves: 2-3 as a starter or side, Preparation time: 45 minutes, plus 30 minutes resting time, Cooking time: 12 minutes
These Chinese ‘Scallion’ Pancakes are 100% wild garlic because I think they’re the perfect vehicle for their mild, slightly vegetal allium flavour, but if you’re after some of that spring onion astringency and texture feel free to use a mixture.
The dipping sauce is the perfect pairing, but it is not exactly my own creation: the back of the packet recipe for dipping sauce on bags of Itsu frozen dumplings is what I used as it’s base, halving the recipe, using Chinese black Chinkiang vinegar as the specified ‘vinegar’ and maple syrup in place of the honey because it’s easy to pour from the big bottle in the fridge. This is the only sauce I ever make for any dumpling.