Top 10 Spring Wild Food Finds
10. Primrose
The Wild, or English Primrose is a pretty, early spring plant with thick and crinkly oblong leaves and pretty five-petalled flowers. The flowers are usually yellow with a darker yellow centre, but can also be white, pink, blue, or purple. Primrose means "First Rose", as it is quite often one of the first flowers to bloom after winter. The flowers can be eaten raw as a salad garnish, or crystalised with sugar to create sweet treats or cake toppings. The leaves can also be used as a raw salad green, or cooked as a pot herb or spinach substitute.
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9. Common Nettle
Purveyor of painful, itchy stings and bumpy red rashes, most children are all too familair with the humble stinging nettle, and have been avoiding them for years! Growing absolutely everywhere, from yards and gardens to fields and woods, the stinging nettle is an amazing superfood with unlimited uses in the kitchen, from soups and mains, and desserts and syrups, to teas and other beverages. Even their seeds can be used.
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8. Garlic-Mustard
Garlic-Mustard, also known as Hedge Mustard, or Jack-By-The-Hedge, is a biennial flowering plant in the mustard family. It can often be found, as one of it's common names suggests, within the shady bases of hedgerows, where it makes a lovely showing every spring. The leaves are a flavourful mix of garlic, with a hint of mustard, making them a very versatile green with a range of culinary uses. The flowers, seeds, and roots are also edible.
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7. Flowering Currant
The Flowering Currant is quite a popular garden plant in the UK due to it's stunning Springtime displays of hanging, decorative blooms. It is related to other edible currants, such as the blackcurrant and redcurrant, and does produce edible berries, but these are lacking in flavour. The real appeal of this plant comes from it's edible flowers, which have a strong herby aroma and taste a little like sweet hibiscus. They can be used for a range of purposes, including raw in a salad or garnish, or infused into syrups, teas or vinegars.
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6. Hairy Bittercress
If you go out into your yard or garden, chances are that you find this plant in a pavement crack or in one of your plant pots. Hairy Bittercress is extremely common and is suprisingly tasty, having a slightly peppery, slightly bitter flavour. It's great as a cress substitute, so is wonderful in a soup or stew, or even on an egg mayo or roast beef sandwich. Hairy Bittercress grows is a mass of small ovate green leaves that forms a tight rosette. It's really easy to ID, and is available all year round.
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5. Lady's Smock
Lady's Smock, also called Cuckoo Flower, is a flowering plant native throughout most of Europe. The Latin specific name pratensis means "meadow", Which is where you're most likely to find this little gem of a herb. Lady's Smock has a wonderful flavour, being at first sweet, fruity and voilet-like, followed by a wasabi-like burning heat. The flowers, stalk and leaves are all edible and make a fantastic and pretty addition to any dish, used either as a garnish or herb.
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4. Common Sorrel
Common Sorrel, also called narrow-leaved dock, is a very common herb found mostly in grassland habitats, but is also cultivated as a garden herb or salad vegetable. The shiny, green-to-reddish leaves of this plant may be puréed in soups and sauces or added to salads and pastries such as tarts. They have a flavour that is similar to sharp, sour apple skin, due to the prescence of oxalic acid. Common Sorrel is very hardy and can be found all year-round.
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3. Wild Leek
Few-Flowered and Three-Cornered Leek are invasive wild onions that have been introduced to the UK from overseas. These plants are in the Allium Genus of plants, and so are related to onions, garlic and leeks and share a resemblance in flavour to both spring onion and garlic. Despite being invasive, they are also extremely delicious, and have a huge number of culinary uses. When combined with other wild greens, such as Wild Garlic and Garlic-Mustard, the collective flavour they impart is just wonderful.
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2. Morel
The Morel is perhaps one of the most sought-after mushrooms in the world. It is sold in continental markets and used extensively in fine cuisine in restaurants around the world. A very distinctive mushroom, it spreads it's spores by firing them forcefully from it's pitted, ridged and honeycombed cap. There are generally only three types of Morel to search for in the UK - the Common Morel, Morchella Vulgaris, the Yellow Morel, Morchella esculenta, and the Black Morel, Morchella importuna, which grows almost exclusively in urban areas in wood chip.
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1. Wild Garlic
Despite being quite abundant in damp woodland and easy to spot (in fact, you'll probably smell them before you see them!), Wild Garlic is often overlooked as the choice edible that it is. These leaves are packed with wonderful garlicky flavour and can be used to take any dish to the next level. We regularly use them as an ingredient in ragus, sauces, kebabs and burgers, or to infuse mayonnaise or yogurt. We also use the unopened buds to make one of the best pickles I've even eaten. Being freezable as well, wild garlic a delicious staple food that can be stored for use all year round.
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