Alys Fowler's gardening columnGardens This article is more than 12 years oldAlys Fowler: Green garlic
This article is more than 12 years oldShout it form the rooftops (but cover your mouth) – it's time to eat garlic wholeWe are fast moving into the wet or green garlic season. This is fresh garlic harvested young and eaten whole. It has only a hint of cloves separating inside the bulb. Those hard paper skins that wrap each clove are soft and tender, and thus you can eat everything. I love wet garlic so much that I over-plant every autumn so I can have plenty.
I often buy up leftover bags of garlic bulbs from the garden centre. Garlic planted late, say at the end of February or March, doesn't get the prerequisite cold period (one or two months below 10C) required to get a decent bulb. This garlic often produces tiny cloves that are fiddly to peel, so the best thing to do with these (or any weedy autumn-planted cloves) is to eat them fresh. You can harvest over the next couple of weeks: by the end of June the papery husks are starting to harden and the season is over for wet garlic.
The taste is mild, sweet and nutty. I love to add a whole bulb to rice (risotto or plain) as it cooks. You can make an excellent fresh garlic soup (think of them as leeks in this case) or roast them whole to intensify the sweetness. For those with a true garlic love, slice them very thinly in salads.
My neighbours on the allotment left behind some garlic they never harvested. Garlic left in the ground becomes overcrowded. That one garlic clove has become a bulb and each clove sprouts. They jostle for space and subsequently you get very thin regrowth. Use these much as you might chives, harvesting them several times before they grow tough. Inside is a thin, tender white stem, a perfect match to spring onions. I have started blanching some under an upturned bucket to get a truly tender stem. They freeze very well.
Finally, if you've planted hard-neck garlic (it has a distinct hard stalk in the middle of the bulb), snap off flowers to encourage the bulb to enlarge. They appear from the centre of the plant and can curl like a serpent or unfurl into a graceful swan-neck. Do not put them on to the compost: they are a gourmet's dream, a delicacy so sweet and fine that I spend all winter dreaming of them.
These flowers are eaten unopened. You can fry them, but my favourite dish is a raw garlic pesto. Blitz the garlic flowers, parmesan, olive oil, a little lemon juice and salt until you get a creamy, light green sauce. Raw garlic is sweet, succulent and mild. If you can stop yourself eating it all, freeze half. There is nothing like pulling summer out of the freezer drawer when all is quiet and dormant.
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