Simply make wild garlic pesto yourself!
Wild garlic – also known as ramsons – is currently sprouting almost everywhere – you can even find it in the English Garden in the middle of Munich! Of course I couldn’t resist, grabbed my bike and a jute bag and went hunting. Especially nowadays, where safety distance has an important place in our daily life, wild garlic can be a little helper: wild garlic smells like common garlic! Or it adds just the certain something to your individual scent… 😉
In fact, many do not know this and think that in addition to the wild garlic, there is also common garlic in my pesto. Wrong thought! The small, green leaf also helps you to keep vampires and other nuisances away from you. So, away with the garlic garland – bring on the wild garlic pesto!
Equipment
- salad dryer
- (immersion) blender
- deep pot for blending
- pan
Ingredients
- 200 g wild garlic ramsons
- 25 g sunflower seeds
- 25 g walnuts
- 200 ml olive oil
- 1 pinch sea salt
- ½ lemon squeezed
Instructions
- Wash fresh wild garlic thoroughly, spin dry in a salad spinner and let it dry well. That makes the pesto last longer later!
- Chop the walnut kernels finely and roast them with the sunflower kernels in a pan without oil.
- Meanwhile, roughly chop the wild garlic and pour it into a deep container.
- Add the nuts, the olive oil, sea salt and the juice of half a lemon and blend until it has the consistency of a pesto. If necessary, season to taste with more salt. Enjoy! 🙂
Nutrients
Take care when collecting!
You can hardly buy wild garlic freshly and you can rarely find it on the market. You should be very careful when collecting, as the lily of the valley and the autumn crocus are very similar to ramsons. Both doubles are poisonous and you should avoid them! Only the wild garlic leaves grow out of the ground one-by-one and smell strongly of garlic.
You can easily put the wild garlic pesto on your freshly baked bread. For example, I also really like it with my chia-buckwheat bread. It also goes well with pasta or grilled vegetables. If you do not want to process all the leaves into pesto, you can also mix them into your green smoothie or put them generally into the salad.
Wild garlic – regional superfood
When it comes to “superfood”, many people immediately think of any exotic fruits, tubers or miracle cures that are difficult to pronounce. But domestic plants also have a lot to offer and are far fresher and more sustainable than food that comes from the other end of the world. The longer the transport route, the more important antioxidants, vitamins, and nutrients are lost. It is therefore important to keep transport routes as short as possible.
With only about 19 calories per 100 g, it is a real lightweight. In addition, with 150 mg of vitamin C per 100 g, it even surpasses the notorious lemon! It is also rich in folic acid and potassium, which in turn is very important for our acid-base balance. Our connective tissue also benefits greatly from this combination! In addition to the antioxidant effect, we also find an antibacterial and anti-inflammatory effect of the secondary plant substances contained in it. Digestive diseases, an elevated cholesterol level but also high blood pressure can be alleviated in studies!
Conscious use of regional food
It is also very important that you use high-quality oil – here more about that in a detailed article about fats and oils. The more tasteless your oil is, the more intense the own taste of wild garlic comes out. You can find really high-quality olive oil, which I like to use here, especially in your organic supermarket.
Where you can collect wild garlic can also be found on mundraub.org. Mundraub is the largest German-speaking platform for freely accessible edible plants, shrubs, or fruit trees. Of course, taking property rights into account or generally using common sense. There are also discovery tours every now and then. In fact, I’ve always wanted to do a wild herb tour!
As you can see, there are plenty of great foods in local climes too! You can find more recipes *here*. Have fun collecting, stinking, and giving away, and as always: Enjoy! 🙂
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Sources for this blogpost
Bombicz, M. et al. 2017: A Novel Therapeutic Approach in the Treatment of Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension: Allium ursinum Liophylisate Alleviates Symptoms Comparably to Sildenafil, in: International Journal of Molecular Sciences, Vol. 18, 2017, No. 7, p. 1436.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5535927/
Bombicz. M. et al. 2016: Anti-Atherogenic Properties of Allium ursinum Liophylisate: Impact on Lipoprotein Homeostasis and Cardiac Biomarkers in Hypercholesterolemic Rabbits, in: International Journal of Molecular Sciences, Vol. 17, 2016, No. 8, p. E1284.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27517918
Petropoulos, S. A./Di Gioia, F./Polyzos, N./Tzortzakis, N. 2020: Natural Antioxidants, Health Effects and Bioactive Properties of Wild Allium Species, in: Current Pharmaceutical Design, E-pub Ahead of Print.
http://www.eurekaselect.com/178988/article
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