Wild Garlic and Potato Soup

Wild Garlic Potato soup is made with only a few ingredients.  Its simplicity
creates a distinctive, subtle flavour

Saturday morning in mid May woke up somewhat confused; after a beautiful week of warmth and sunshine that easily could have been masquerading as almost summery June days, Saturday woke up crummy, cold and wet an almost early April day.  It was the kind of day that called for Saturday morning papers, tea and sweet things to begin and a long day curled up, warm and inside.  But it wasn’t to be.  Off in the cool rain to work for seven hours in the kitchen and to come home to menus demanding to be finished, students papers to grade and finally to the Boston-Tampa game to forget it all.  That was the plan…….but the best laid plans.

As I said, it certainly wasn’t a day fit for man nor beast to be walking around in the eastern Ontario woodlands and fields.  Anyhow, not for most people.  For wild edible foragers are of another kind.  Late in the day, running from bike to store collecting the last of Saturday night’s dinner, I received a call from Ivan.  He and his son had been out all day foraging wild garlic.  They had 10 pounds fresh picked, did I want it. 

One doesn’t say no when Ivan calls with wild garlic – or especially if he calls with morels in baskets – and any hope of growing roots into the sofa in front of the television and sitting through three periods of mayhem went out the window. 

Every spring for the last maybe 15 years I make at least a pot, or maybe a more, of potato-wild garlic soup.  Wild garlic is sometimes called stink weed and having a canvas bag of 10 pounds of it in the basement immediately reveals why it has that particular nickname.  But when matched with potatoes all the stink goes out of it.  The transformation is remarkable: cooking over a low heat in butter it slowly releases a sweet subtle aroma.  Wine, potatoes and stock – in can be vegetable or chicken stock – finish the pot. 

The result is a beautiful smooth, creamy soup – with absolutely no cream.  On first tasting it, the immediate flavour is of potato.  But there is an underlying taste, at first just there and after a few spoons, a very definite, but always understated flavour.  That’s the wild garlic.  The sense of wild garlic becomes more prominent if you mince the green leafs or make a gremolatta with leaf, bulb and lemon.  But with my first bowl I prefer the clean and simple flavour of bulbs and potatoes.

Enjoy.

I am presenting this soup un a bowl made by my sister.  I love the way that the red tipped bud of the leaf mimics the line of the bowl.  The spoon is from a collection of 1930's Bakelite cutlery that Jeanette and I purchased about 30 years on a then un-trendy Queen Street

Ramp-Potato Soup

for the soup:

½ cup wild garlic bulbs, minced                           4 Tbsp. butter

1 cup white wine                                                    5 russet potatoes to make about 6-8 cups        

stock to cover                                                         salt and pepper

Sweat the wild garlic in the butter until very aromatic and tender; add the wine, bring to a boil and reduce by half.  Add the potatoes and stock – I cover the potatoes by about an inch of stock, cooking until the potatoes are very tender.  Puree – there’s no need to pass the soup.  Adjust the seasoning.

for the gremolatta:

1 cups wild garlic greens                                       4 Tbsp. wild garlic bulbs

4 Tbsp. lemon zest                                                 ½ cup almonds

Chop everything together.  Great on the soup or used on salads.