Wild garlic is the ingredient du jour these days. Good Lord, you can even buy it in the shops. Just as you can buy dandelion leaves in France. It even turned up in my veg. box last week: which was faintly annoying, as I can have as large a haul as I want of the stuff, simply by stepping out of the door and taking a two-minute walk to the woods.
It was fine though, as it made sure I tried this recipe from one of my favourite food bloggers, Linda Duffin, aka Mrs. Portly. A recipe for gnocchi? Good. With wild garlic? Excellent. But fried in butter and oil before serving? Wasn’t that a little odd? No, it wasn’t. It changed those gnocchi from comforting nursery fodder into something altogether more satisfactory to accompany a fine plate of local sausages and some barely cooked purple sprouting broccoli. Don’t tell Linda, by the way, but I steamed my potatoes rather than baking them. It was absolutely fine.
Linda’s asked me to cut and paste her post rather than reblogging it. I hope this won’t dissuade you from exploring her site. You’ll find some recipes you’ll want to try out within moments.
Mrs Portly’s Kitchen
A Suffolk Aga Saga
Pan-Fried Wild Garlic Gnocchi
Wild garlic abounds at this time of year … everywhere except in my neighbourhood. I am planting some for next year but in the meantime I have to forage far afield to find it. There are alternatives though if it’s equally elusive where you live.
You can replace it with three-cornered leek, which often grows wild where garlic doesn’t, or steal a few leaves from any domestic garlic bulbs you may have growing in the garden. I haven’t tried it with the green part of spring onions but it’s worth experimenting.
You don’t have to pan-fry the gnocchi (in which case try brown butter, a few fried sage leaves and grated parmesan) but it’s a lovely way to eat them, either as a side dish, or on their own with a good tomato sauce.
We ate them with seared venison fillet and purple sprouting broccoli, steamed and tossed with a mixture of butter, lemon juice and zest and anchovy.
Any leftover gnocchi can be frozen, uncooked, in a single layer. Transfer to a sealable bag and when you want to eat them, cook from frozen, straight into boiling water.
A note on foraging: it’s not illegal to pick flowers, fruit, fungi and foliage in the UK provided it’s for personal rather than commercial use. There are exceptions to this: local by-laws may forbid foraging and for obvious reasons you can’t do it at Sites of Special Scientific Interest.
It is illegal to uproot a plant and it’s sensible to pick a leaf or two from lots of plants rather than to denude one. And bear in mind that while foraging isn’t classed as theft, you may still be committing the civil offence of trespass. If in doubt, ask the landowner.
PAN-FRIED WILD GARLIC GNOCCHI
Ingredients:
700g floury potatoes
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
120g wild garlic leaves, thoroughly rinsed, or 80g domestic garlic leaves
2 egg yolks
150g plain flour
Rice flour, for dusting
Olive oil and butter, for frying
Method:
Bake the potatoes until soft. As soon as they’re cool enough to handle, scoop out the middles and push through a ricer into a bowl. Allow to cool.
Blanch the garlic leaves in boiling water for a minute, drain very thoroughly and chop finely. Add to the potato along with the eggs yolks and stir with a fork to mix.
Season well and add three-quarters of the flour, stirring with the fork again. Form into a dough and add more flour as necessary until you have a soft, pliable but not overly sticky dough. You may not need all the flour. Try not to over-work it or your gnocchi will be tough.
Dust your work surface lightly with rice flour. Divide the dough into four and roll into sausages, about 2cm in diameter. With a sharp knife, cut into 2.5cm sections.
You can either use these as they are, as little cushions, or roll them over a floured fork to make indentations. These ridges are supposed to help sauce adhere but honestly, I don’t think it makes much difference and unless you are deft and experienced, there’s a danger of over-working the dough.
Bring a large pan of salted water to a boil and drop in the gnocchi in batches. Don’t overcrowd the pan. They’re about done when they bob to the surface, around three minutes. Give them another 20 seconds then taste one: it should be cooked through and not floury. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain well.
Heat two tablespoons of olive oil with a good knob of butter in a heavy-based pan and fry the gnocchi on each side until golden brown. Eat straight away.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
Looks delicious, I could almost smell the food.
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Good. Bon appetit!
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Thanks for sharing, Margaret, much appreciate. Sorry for the clunky reposting thing but you know why! So pleased you enjoyed the gnocchi enough to share with your friends. Lx
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It wasn’t clunky at all. Just sorry it made it slightly less easy for readers to decide to access your blog x
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Well, thanks for the signpost! Lxx
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*appreciated* Heavens,my typing is going downhill rapidly. 🙂
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Join the club.
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Two of my favourite blogs in one!
I have made Mrs Portly’s Chicken with Potato Gnocchi and Parmesan Cream recipe before and that’s well worth checking out too. The gnocchi were light, fluffy and delicious.
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I’m on the case, very soon! Thanks.
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Thank you, Penny!
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Alas, we haven’t found any wild garlic yet this year. I’ve only made (parsnip) gnocchi once via a Riverford recipe and it felt like so much work for relatively tasteless food. I reckon that would NOT be the case with wild garlic involved, though.
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I promise you, these are tasty – and easy. Let’s hope you can find a handful somewhere. That’s all you need. To be honest, I’m a Riverford customer too, and I’m not that impressed with their recipes. Having said that, I’m making this weeks’ recipe, potato and wild garlic soup, as we speak
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We have often been let down by Riverford recipes, I’m afraid; we only have a few tried and tested ones.
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Mmmmmm looks delicious, and we have wild garlic in droves down here. I shall be off to visit Mrs Portly in a moment, and I’ll be pondering how to make low-carb gnocchi…. 😐
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They’ll be lowish-carb won’t they?
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…. and seeking more wild garlic recipes. (Sorry – hit ‘send’ too soon). I made a mental note about this last year and promptly forgot it. Thanks for the reminder!
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I need to find a few more too. Drowning in the stuff.
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I don’t know if wild garlic is all the rage here–I’ll need to go looking for it. But I do love gnocchi and like the idea of pan frying it!
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Highly recommended. And I’d love to know if you find any wild garlic – also called ramsons here, if that helps. Actually, I’ve just looked it up. You may not be in luck as it’s native in Europe and Asia. As you see though, Linda makes alternative suggestions, lacking wild garlic.
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The abundance of wild garlic was something I remembered about our trip to Yorkshire. There isn’t much around here but I do vaguely remember a patch from last year -I’ll have to go hunting!
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You get yourself out there. Happy hunting!
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mmm. . . It looks delicious. One of my favorite things about spring is that it’s the perfect time to forage wonderful food from the wild.
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It is? Do you have this in the US? I looked it up in response to Kerry’s comment, and saw that it is native only in Europe and Asia …. but these things have a habit of spreading.
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This looks yummy!
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It is. And you can put a lot away for another day.
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