Wild garlic pasta

King and I love nature, we go hiking and foraging in woodlands most weekends. For us, foraging is not just a fun activity that we can do together but it also gives us a deep sense of connection with nature. We love to explore, learn how different ecosystems work, and try to identify trees, wild herbs, and mushrooms. Collecting wild ingredients is really rewarding, not to mention most wild food is super nutritious… so here we go, another foraged food recipe!

Spring is the perfect time to forage – you can find an abundance of wild garlic all across the UK in woodland areas. It’s even possible to find it in your own garden – it grows everywhere, especially in shady areas near water from late March to June.

If you’re not familiar with foraging, you can find more information on wild garlic identification (including how and where to find it) here. You can also get wild garlic from an organic shop or a farmer’s market but if not you can replace it with basil or rocket!

Before you go out and pick your own wild food, I also recommend you read my other article 7 rules for foraging. Please pick responsibly and always leave the place as it is.

Ok, enough talking, let’s begin.

First, roast the pine nuts in the oven at 180C. Keep your eyes on them as they brown quickly and only take 3-5 minutes.

I’ve made both basil pesto and wild garlic pesto lots of times before but this was my first time pre-roasting the pine nuts. It turned out so well and gave great extra flavour to the pesto so I think I’ll always roast the pine nuts for pesto now.

Once you’ve roasted the pine nuts, add all the pesto ingredients to a small food processor.

Blend for 3-5 minutes until a paste forms. You may need to use a spatula to scrape the mixture off the sides a few times to make sure everything is blended well. Sorry, the picture may be a little misleading as I’ve taken them from my other recipe – wild garlic pesto, and that time I didn’t roast the pine nuts.

If you’ve made the wild garlic pesto ahead of time, you can skip these steps and add 4 tbsp of garlic pesto instead.

Cook the pasta in boiling, salted water. Follow the cooking time on the pasta packaging.

Once cooked, drain the pasta in a sieve and shake to remove all the excess water.

Combine the pasta and pesto sauce, stir well until the sauce covers the pasta evenly.

Be careful, wild garlic has a very delicate flavour. If you heat it for more than a minute the flavour will completely vanish and it’ll just taste more or less like spinach. So, if you’d prefer a milder garlic flavour you can put the pasta back in the saucepan whilst it’s still hot and mix with the pesto for 30 seconds or so.

Finally, garnish the pasta with the remaining pine nuts and wild garlic flowers (optional) before serving.

Bear in mind that while the whole wild garlic plant is edible the flowers taste five times stronger than the leaves so only add them if you’re a massive garlic fan like me. 😜

This delicious wild garlic pasta is a real spring treat, it’s garlicky, earthy, and really flavoursome. It doesn’t need much cooking time and is ready in just 15 minutes! I hope you enjoy it as much as we do! x

Let me know if you try out this recipe. You can leave a comment below, or take a picture and tag it with #k33_kitchen and share it on Instagram! I’d love to see what you come up with. Cheers, hope you enjoy my recipes!