How to Make: Wild Garlic Salts
Jamie Dakota
Here a quick and easy way to use those amazing but short lived wild garlic flavours to make long life salt for the store cupboard.
I’ve used two different plants to make two separate salts, so let’s take a look at those plants:
Hedge Garlic | Jack-by-the-Hedge | Alliaria Petiolata
Being a biennial this plant has a two year life cycle, it spends it first year close to the ground in a rosette of small heart shaped leaves. Its second year sees it shoot up a tall flower stem, with a ladder of leaves all the way up. They can get up to 150cm tall in my experience, crowned with a clump of four petals flowers in little crosses. Hedge garlic is in the mustard family, the Brassicaceae, and certainly the leaves have a mild mustard hint to the garlicky flavour, the mustard flavour is packed powerfully into the seeds however which we might revisit later in the year.
The young leaves of the first years growth or the very top leaves of the second year are the best for cooking. Simply chopped and added to salad is another easy way to use the hedge garlic.
It’s hard to confuse Hedge garlic with another plant, especially in it’s second year with the tall stem and frilly edged heart-shaped leaves with little white crosses for flowers. The smell of garlic/mustard is also a huge ID feature.
The delicate flavour of Hedge Garlic is quickly lost when cooked, so I tend to add this plant more often to salads or right at the very end of stir-fry immediately before serving.
Wild Garlic | Ramsons | Allium Ursinum
This pungent plant is widely known, being most people first introduction to wild food. It likes to grow in the wet and shade, so is usually found by streams. It has long lance-like leaves, which you’ll most likely smell before you see. Indeed it is the smell that clearly indicates this plant.
It grows in dense carpets and often has other similar looking plants growing amongst it which can be poisonous. Notably, be sure to be able to recognise Lily of the Valley, and Arum Maculatum, before foraging this plant. The strong garlic/ spring onion smell is really going to help you with this one, just be sure to collect Ramsons one leaf at a time so that you don’t accidentally pull up a neighbouring plant along with it.
Arum Maculatum
Hiding within the Ramsons
Arum Maculatum
The sheathed flower stem of Arum (Lords and Ladies) growing under the Ramsons, take care when collecting
Being in the same family as onion are garlic, the Amaryllidaceae, Ramsons have a garlic flavour that is, at least to me, closer to spring onion that to garlic. It is powerfully flavoured, and retains much of that flavour when cooked, making it ideal for soup, pesto, garlic bread.
Making garlic salt
Two Batches:
In both cases I used by weight a roughly 2:1 ratio salt : leaves. This seemed to work well in the end product, though I think I may try 1:1 next time to see whether I get more flavour without compromising on shelf life.
As a guide I used about 250g salt for each of the mixes, and finished with two jar of each type of salt at the end. I use fresh leaves and allow the natural moisture of the leaves to dissolve some of the salt during the process, which I find gives a better infusion of flavour that using dried leaves and simple blending with salt.
With the Hedge Garlic I made the salt as I have for several years, this method creates a mix of salt crystal sizes ideal for salads and couscous. With the Ramsons I experimented with adding more water to fully dissolve the salt to see whether I got a more consistent mixing of salt and flavour.
Hedge Garlic
Ramsons
Both blends were then set in the dehydrator overnight, at about 50C. If you don’t have a dehydrator you could use your oven on low or simply allow the water to evaporate naturally by a window or in the airing cupboard.
Once fully dry there should be no sign of moisture left as you break the resulting hard residue up.
And there you have it!
You can see from adding the water and fully dissolving the salt in the Ramsons method I got smaller salt crystals at the end and there are visibly less leaf matter in the final salt. The Hedge Garlic mix has bigger crystals for a better texture in salads etc. I must say though in terms of flavour transfer to the salt there wasn’t much difference that I can tell, although as you’d expect the Ramsons have a stronger overall kick given their inherent potency.
I hope you enjoyed the article, and if you have a go yourself, do it different, or indeed what to ask anything, please do feel free to comment below.
All the best
JD