Before last week, I didn’t know what garlic scapes were. I’d never seen them, smelled them, or touched them, and I most certainly did not know where they came from. But our Harmony Valley farm share delivered local, organic scapes to Minneapolis last week - and oh, how far my family has come in one short week.
According to Mother Earth News:
If you grow your own garlic or have a good farmer’s market, then you can enjoy a new kind of vegetable — garlic scapes. The scapes are the flower stems that garlic plants produce before the bulbs mature. Growers often remove the scapes to push the plant’s energy toward bigger bulbs, and when harvested while they are young and tender, the scapes are delicious.
Garlic scape enthusiasts are many - they include pretty much everyone who’s tried them in the right season. I’m happy to count myself as one of them now, thanks to an incredible meal my wife cooked the other day. The scampi-like recipe, as much as one exists, went down something like this:
- First the scapes were sauteed in the olive oil, and shrimp were coated in flour.
- Next, white wine, lemon, and the shrimp were added to the pan.
- Next, butter was added, and the whole thing came together.
- Finally, the perfectly cooked shrimp and scapes were served over gnocchi.
We drank Francis Coppola’s Russian River Valley Viognier with the meal, and frankly, I’m not through raving about it. The garlic scapes, true to what I’d heard, tasted very much like garlic - not terribly surprising, I realize, since they are garlic. But their texture was much more like cooked green beans. Plus, as you can see from the picture above, they look really cool. I hope we get them again soon.
This post was proudly submitted to Food Renegade’s Fight Back Fridays and Real Food Wednesdays.
