Fermented Wild Garlic

With so much wild garlic ready for picking at the start of the month I wanted to properly take advantage of it this year. 

I looked online and in a few books to see what else could be done with this wild harvest. One idea that really got me curious was to ferment it. I've been wanted to try more fermented stuff and as I have a talk on preserving later in the year I thought that might make a useful bit of the talk! 

Another thing I really liked was how little of any other ingredients it used. The recipes all used a bit of salt but not very much, great for being more off grid and sustainable if you haven't got to buy in loads of other items to make a preserve.

I didn't really use any one recipe but more just got an idea of what I supposed to do then tried it.

I went a bit mad with picking and ended up picking 3kg of wild garlic leaves and a few unopened flower buds. I washed these in the sink, but made sure I dried them off. Apparently the chemicals in the tap water might inhibit the fermentation process, next time I do it at my friends house where they have spring water! 

I then roughly chopped it and added 25g of salt for every kilo of leaves. I added the leaves and salt in layers until the bucket I was using was full. I then let it sit for an hour.

When I came back the liquid within the leaves was starting to draw out. This is the bit to get your hands in there! I mushed the leaves up until I had enough liquid to cover all the leaves.

After about 10 minutes of squishing I found a plate just smaller than the top of the bucket and pushed down the liquid so all the leaves were submerged. I then weighted it down with a jug of water and left it for 24 hours.

I then transferred the rather strong smelling liquid and leaves to a couple of Kilner jars. The trick is to keep it all submerged so I filled a couple of freezer bags with water and added them to the top. This seemed to work well.

Then ferment to taste. I have no idea what I like when it comes to fermented food so I just let it do it's thing for a few weeks. The first week it didn't seem to do much anyway.

From the three kilos of leaves I got just the two jars in the picture above! I really goes to nothing!

When the two weeks was up I put it into jam jars to be stored in the fridge, or in my case a cool shed! It's still fermenting so it might need to be opened to stop it exploding.

When I tasted it I was surprised how good it was. Really lovely garlic flavour, really strong and still a little bit crisp but slightly salty.  My wife did her usual when she tried it and was surprised it was so tasty - so little faith in my abilities!

You certainly don't need much of it to flavour a meal, and it works great  as a condiment. I'm looking forward to adding ti to soups as well.

I'm just wondering what else I should ferment now! Who has some ideas and recipes?