Blah.
Things are finally starting to pick up at the farm! After eating tons and tons of lettuce and chard (and asparagus... hehe) the fruiting crops are arriving! Recently we've had peas (whose season is now over! I can't believe it!) and strawberries (also over!). I just got my first squash :) :) and some delicious delicious Carola potatoes~
Oh, but not too long ago were garlic scapes.
This is my first year pickling scapes. I've been meaning to write about this, but just haven't had time.
First and foremost, garlic scapes are the flowery parts of garlic. When garlic figures it's time to reproduce, it bolts and sends out this bud. Most of the time, when a plant bolts, it makes the entire plant gross and bitter. Garlic scapes, I look forward to. :)
When Craig talked about garlic scapes earlier this year I didn't understand what he was talking about. Then I saw them.
Oh the childhood memories!
In South Korea, garlic scapes are a big sign of spring. Everyone pickles them and they're just a delightful condiment served with meals. I don't think I've had them in years but it brought so many memories. Scapes can be preserved in soy sauce, mounds of red pepper paste, or in fermented soy bean paste. It can be cooked to soften the texture first, or pickled fresh to keep in the crunch. I prefer the crunchy pickle.
Garlic scapes are a wonderful crop. They're milder in flavor than garlic bulbs, and the flavor a little more delicate. I think it's perfectly acceptable to just munch on them raw. Pickling them gets rid of a lot of the bite, however, so you can eat lots of them! Craig says that his family runs them through a food processor and freezes them to use just like garlic. I've found that I don't like them cooked at all. Instead of becoming sweet like garlic bulbs do when cooked, I've found they just lose most of their flavor. Just my opinion, though :)
The first week we started having scapes, I was a little wary. I knew that I wanted to pickle them, but didn't know if I'd be able to do it. So I brought a little sample home. And by "little" sample, I mean about a pound of this stuff!
So on this little vegetable, the stem, up to the bulb is edible. If you run your hand on the top, however, you can feel that about an inch above the bulb, the plant becomes tougher. That part gets cut off and discarded. The bulb and the scape along the bottom, however, is all soft and edible.
From there, I cut the scape into manageable pieces, about 1.5" or so and put them in a bowl to rinse.
And voila, ready to go! To make the pickling mixture, I mixed 1 cup of soy sauce, with 2 cups of water, 1/2 c of vinegar, 1/2 c of sugar, and 1/4 c of salt. Brought that to a rolling boil and in the meantime, washed and sanitized my jars and lids!
Once that was done, I packed my jars as tightly as I could (oh, and I should mention, never put a hot jar on a cold surface! Use a towel or a trivet or something). I didn't have to worry about smashing any delicate vegetables or anything as garlic scapes tend to be pretty robust.
And then i filled the jars with boiling hot liquid. Woot!
Now, with these jars, I didn't process at all. I figured there weren't that many, so I'd just eat them right away. If you wanted to keep them for storage purposes, they need to be processed and sealed. Up the vinegar in the recipe to 1/2 c, and process in a hot water bath for about 5 minutes. The scapes will be a little more tender, but they should still have some crunch to it. I like putting it into the fridge after 3 days. Because of the salt content, they tend to keep for a very very long time.
I ate these with rice after about a week. OMG. Foodmemoryflashbacks.
I promptly went back to the farm.
I'm set for the year now. I pretty much took an entire bed of garlic scapes, mashing it down into the bag so that I could get as many as I could. There's about 6 lbs of garlic scapes in there..... Christmas presents for my siblings?
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