Ramping up Dinner and the Garden

A customer swapped me some fresh ramps for some of our product, so another adventure with wild food has begun. He shipped them to me damp and dirty – perfect to keep them fresh and perky during the trip from his door to mine. They were in prime condition when I received them.

One of the reasons I was curious to try them is because they seem to have a “love ’em or hate ’em” reputation. Having really enjoyed our wild garlic and wild onions previously, I wanted to know which camp they fell into, and whether there was anything special about them.

I planted about a third of them in two pots, since our garden this year is again a container garden. I cut up a third of them to put into a potato soup for dinner. Then I cut up the other third and laid them on my drying racks.

My hands do not smell much of the ramps – they actually smell more of the potatoes that I peeled. My eyes did not water when prepping them either, which I find a welcome difference from most onions. The room in which they are drying, however, is strongly pungent. As in, you open the door and the smell comes out to slap you upside the nostrils.

The Ramps smell like a cross between an onion and Elephant Garlic. You know, that sort of garlicky smell that Elephant Garlic has that is not QUITE garlic, and has an underlying nauseating note to it? I do not like Elephant Garlic because it lacks the savory flavor I love about real Garlic (and no, Elephant Garlic is not a true garlic). But that element in the ramps is not strong enough to put me off the way it does with the EG.

If you Google “cooking with Ramps” you find all sorts of recipes using ingredients that I do not keep in my kitchen. You actually have to dig a bit to find traditional uses of ramps, which is pretty much like onions or leeks.

Eggs, potatoes, biscuits, quiche, and grilled with mushrooms to pile on top of a steak are some of the traditional ways of using ramps. You can substitute scallions or shallots for ramps in any recipe, and vice-versa.

Ramps can be used fresh, or cooked. They also dehydrate well. A cousin of mine says that raw ramps can cause the same digestive affects as beans, so if you choose to slap some ramp leaves onto your sandwich while you are in the woods (or at the table), you may need to warn your family to run for cover in a few hours. I have not tested this out, it is purely hearsay from him, and from the uncle that showed him the patch of ramps where he discovered that for him, our uncle knew what he was talking about!

Our potato soup has some ground beef in it, and some Real Salt Seasoning Salt, some Meadow Mushrooms, and the potatoes and ramps. And butter. You cannot leave out the butter in potato soup. When was almost done, I added some heavy cream and flour mixture to thicken it a bit.

The finished soup tasted as though it had both garlic and onions in it. This leads me to suggest that you use Ramps in recipes that tend more toward garlic than toward onion, since they do not have much of the sweet taste of cooked onions, but more of the pungent flavor of garlic. We only used a relatively small amount in the soup also (it was a big pot of soup), and it flavored it strongly enough to really taste the flavor, but not enough to overpower. It seemed to go well with the Meadow Mushrooms, at least, if you like mushrooms!

We not only planted some of the full ramps, we also planted the root ends after I finished chopping up the ramps for the soup. Onion roots re-grow, so we will find out if ramps do also.

Ramps are a multiplier type bulb, so they will split when they reach a certain point in development, and multiply. They also set seed that drops and creates new bulbs. More like the mini-bulblets that wild garlic sets, and not like the skinny seeds that regular onions drop. They also tend to grow their bulbs downward into the ground, also like wild garlic, so the bulbs will be fairly deep in the ground. You have to dig ramps, you cannot pull them or you will just rip off the tops.

As one of the first green things to come up in certain areas in the spring, ramps have traditional importance in some regional cultures. For me, the interest is mainly that they are a wild thing that I can learn to use and cultivate, so that the culture is not lost. Since they are a popular item for upscale gourmet cooking among a certain segment of society, there may be a potential income opportunity in the future, if I should wish to produce seed or bulbs. Growing them will provide an advantage for our gardens also, because they produce so early in the gardening season, that they’ll be producing while the traditional garlic and onions are thinking about sprouting.

Most sources state that ramps only grow in the eastern states, and north into Canada, but the cousin who warns about the flatulent affects of fresh ramps found them in the Pacific Northwest, so they are likely far more prevalent than commonly known. But then, in the PNW, there are some other spring plants that look very similar, so it may be that people there are just more cautious about harvesting them, even though the smell of the roots will tell you for certain what you have! Or, upon further contemplation, perhaps the Pacific Northwest just has more green stuff in the spring, so ramps are largely unappreciated there.

Having tried them, I’d use them again, probably in chicken, sauteed in butter, or over pasta. I think they go best with light dishes where the flavor of them is featured rather than lost, and in simple things where the flavors don’t get so complicated that the pungency of the ramps conflicts with the other ingredients. I don’t think I’d enjoy them whole as a dish themselves, since the flavor is pretty strong, but lean toward using them more as a seasoning.

I’ll have dried ramps to use as seasoning through the summer, and next year, if my pots of ramps do well, I’ll have a little more to cook with, dry, and to expand my containers of them.

I don’t think I’ll ever be an outright afficianado, but I’m pleased to have tried them, and pleased to be one of those people who does not hate them! And I am very happy to be able to grow them.