Early Spring Foraging: Garlic Mustard

Reader Contribution by Leda Meredith
Published on June 19, 2020
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Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) has been hanging out all winter, even when its leaves were buried under snow. The plants will start putting out lush and perky new growth now that the days are noticeably longer and temperatures at least slightly milder.

Garlic mustard tastes like a lightly bitter leafy green with flavors of…you guessed it, garlic and mustard.

This plant offers several different ways to spice up your cooking. It is a biennial, which means that it starts growing in the late summer and fall of one year, overwinters, and then goes to seed and completes its life cycle the following year. During its first year, it hangs out as a rosette of heart-shaped leaves with scalloped margins and a net-like pattern of veins.

In late winter and early spring, I like to use foraged garlic mustard combined with milder greens and field garlic in pestos and braised greens. Now is also a good time to dig up some of the roots. These can be used just like horseradish. They’re stringier though, so best minced very finely.

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