Wild Garlic - Foraging and Pesto

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Today we're in the woods foraging for wild garlic. So in this video, we're going to show you how to forage for wild garlic, the best places to find it, what to do with it once you've kind of foraged it and got it back to the kitchen. We're going to make a wild garlic pesto. I'm here today with all my family, so Helen, my partner, and Ivy, my daughter/apprentice, and then we've also got Jasper the dog.

Hello.

He's having great fun. So this is what you're looking for here. This is wild garlic all coming through. It's very young at this time of the year, which means that, um, it's not bitter at all and the leaves are kind of nice and soft and there's no stringy bits in them. If you look up kind of where we are at the moment though, we're quite close to a populated area. It's a popular dog walking site here, so definitely don't take anything kind of close to a dog walking site. Um, potential risk of contamination with feces and stuff like that. So you want to find a nice Isolated place where you know that the, the product and the wild garlic is going to be really, really clean.

Okay.

So just a few more close-ups of the wild garlic here. Like I say, the easiest way for you to identify it is just to pick it and give it a smell. You can immediately tell that it's kind of like a wild garlic. You're looking for the nice small young leaves. This is the perfect time to kind of get them. This probably here is like a nice example of what you're kind of looking for. Make sure you don't get any other weeds in there as well, and make sure you're in an area where there's no kind of dog walkers or poo or feces or wee or anything like that around. Like, we'll give them a good clean when we get home anyway, but you really want to find a nice out-of-the-way place to pick your wild garlic in the first place.

So we're going to fill about half of this bag to be able to make one decent-sized batch of pesto. It's surprising really how much you need, but equally if you look around at the amount there is just in this one little spot, it won't take long. So yeah, this is a great thing you can do with the whole family, and Ivy was enjoying this. until she got distracted by sticks and the stream. So here we are again picking some more wild garlic, and Ivy's busying herself with sticks once again, which is her favorite pastime at the moment. So we're picking here, we're right next to a stream that's just over there, and behind me over here there's a, there's a road. Now it's quite a quiet road, so we don't think it's an issue that there's a road close by, and it sort of goes to show that even if you live in a, in a more built-up area, You might find nature reserves and plenty of little pockets where you will find wild garlic.

Ivy's picked up some lovely specimens of wild garlic along with some amazing sticks and leaves, so make sure that you pick out kind of anything within the mix that isn't wild garlic, but we'll do that when we get back to the kitchen. So we've got our bag of wild garlic and now we're going to take it back home into the kitchen and make a wild garlic pesto. So the first thing that we've done is So we've gone through all of the wild garlic that we picked, and we picked out anything that wasn't wild garlic. So that's really important, just go through if there's any other plants or weeds in there, just go through and kind of check it out and make sure you've picked out anything that's not wild garlic.

So what we've done is taken the garlic and we've given it a good rinse under the tap just to make sure it's really clean. Ivy kindly added all sorts into, into our bag when we were foraging, as you might imagine. So that's had a good wash, and then we've made sure that we've got most of the water off so it's not soggy.

So the recipe that we're using is 100 grams of wild garlic, 50 grams of Parmesan cheese, 50 grams of a mixture of pine nuts and hazelnuts that we've pre-toasted, and then you've got to make sure that they're cool, so you don't want to put them in when they're warm. And then we use a bit of salt, a bit of pepper, and then sunflower oil to get it to the correct consistency. So a lot of recipes ask for garlic, as in like real garlic. You definitely don't need any real garlic, the wild garlic is strong enough. And a number of recipes have you use olive oil or even rapeseed oil, and the flavour is a little bit overpowering, I find, with that. So I really do think the best oil that you can use is sunflower oil. So Ivy got a little bit bored, so she's gone out into another room now. So what we've done is we've put absolutely everything into the Nutri Ninja. So it's the 100 grams of wild garlic, 50 grams of Parmesan cheese, 50 gram mix of pine nuts and toasted hazelnuts, and then we've topped it up with oil, maybe like about an inch of oil. You just need to kind of see how much it's going to use, and then we blitz it up. So you want to blitz it down until it's as fine as you can possibly get it. You don't want any bits in there. And that's it, it's made. It really is as easy as that. So this will keep now in the freezer for months and months. If you want to keep it in the fridge, if you put it into a jar and then put a thin layer of oil over the top, it'll keep in the fridge for at least a few weeks as well. Something I'm just going to quickly make here as well is something that we're using today. So it's a really nice tip and a way of using up your wild garlic pesto. So these containers here, they're the kind of containers you see in takeaway places that they put ketchup in. So I always have a couple of these knocking around. I use them for drizzling oils over foods. We've got the pizza oven going today in another video, and we're going to do a wild garlic pesto oil to drizzle on the pizza once it's finished. It's a really, really nice way of using it and gives you a lovely green vibrant colour to your pizza as well. So it's very easy to make, and I know I said don't use olive oil with the wild garlic pesto, but on the pizza it's really nice. So I just add kind of like Good glug of olive oil like that, and you can kind of see how vibrant and green that wild garlic pesto is. Like, it really is delicious. And then you just want to take a couple of teaspoonfuls of wild garlic pesto, put it into your oil, and just give that a shake. As you can see, do you know what I mean, it's very oily still. And all I'm going to use that for is kind of drizzling around the edge of a pizza just to give that bit of wild garlic taste. It's a really nice way of using it. So what else would I use the wild garlic pesto for? It's for something really, really simple really. I like it just with some nice freshly boiled pasta, keep it al dente, bit of wild garlic pesto, and then some nice grated, freshly grated Parmesan and some freshly ground pepper on top. And it's really, really nice. Just keep it simple. I went to an event a couple of weeks back and met a guy called Chad from Amber Mays, and he had a wild garlic pesto there as well, and he actually served it on a grilled rump of lamb, and it was sublime. So it works really, really well with meats as well. I'm so glad I didn't use the olive oil in it because every time I've made this in the past when I've used the olive oil, it's just too strong and all you can taste is the olive oil, and I think there's a real clash of flavours. So with the sunflower oil, all you can taste is the wild garlic, the Parmesan, and the toasted nuts, and it's a really, really nice mix. So that's it. So thanks for watching the video. We're going to have plenty more like this, kind of adventures out into the wild with Ivy and Helen. We'll do loads of foraging, we'll bring it back to the kitchen, and then we'll cook it up and kind of make some nice food. So if you enjoy the videos, please do subscribe to the channel. I know it's called Black Mountain Honey and it's predominantly about beekeeping, but we're going to do more and more of these food, nature, foraging videos, because I think that's what people want to see. So thanks for watching. Please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.