Cooking with garlic scapes

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This week on the Local Food Report, garlic scapes are in season at the Truro Farmers Market, and there are so many good ways to cook them.

If you’ve ever grown your own garlic, you’ve probably noticed that each bulb you plant sends up a tall, twisty flower stalk around this time of year. Matthew Mylin, a farmer in South Orleans, is selling them by the bundle.

“Garlic scapes to me are a sweeter, more subtle garlic flavor, kind of a greenish garlic,” Mylin says. “I also sometimes describe them as sort of like a garlicky asparagus, but with better texture.”

The scapes are the garlic plants’ way of reproducing. Left to their own devices, they open into a flower filled with hundreds of tiny seeds called bulbils. They look like tiny garlic cloves.

“If I let that just stay naturally, it would fall into the soil and then reseed itself,” Mylin says.

Reseeding that way would take a lot longer to grow a clove of garlic.

“I've planted the garlic bulbils before because you can sometimes get more interesting varieties,” he says. “With garlic cloves, every plant—it's kind of like bananas—every plant is a clone. It's the same DNA, but with the bulbils, it's brand-new DNA, so it could be a lot better or a lot worse. If you grow it out, it's a two-year process to get a full bulb.”

In other words, it’s a commitment. As a result, most garlic growers cut their scapes so that the plant will send more energy to its roots. Also, harvesting the scapes provides a way to make tasty meals laced with fresh garlic flavor. 

“My favorite thing to do is to just kind of roll them in olive oil, salt and pepper, and then grill them like you would asparagus,” Mylin says. “It only takes like 45 seconds to a minute, each side.”

A woman in the booth next to Mylin told me she’d tried garlic scape mashed potatoes at his suggestion and they were delicious. A few booths down, Truro home gardener and market coordinator Jackie Opitz says she’s also been experimenting.

“We had a lot of garlic scapes this year, so I've been trying to get creative with different options,” Opitz says. “I made the classic garlic scape butter.”

She explains the process.

“Pretty simple,” Opitz says. “Just food process the garlic scapes and mix it into store-bought butter at room temperature. It adds extra flavor for anything you want to use your butter on. It's delicious, and kind of helps preserve the garlic scapes a little longer." 

She also pickled garlic scapes this year.

“They are a great little vinegary crunch on a sandwich,” she says. “And last year we made garlic scape salt. We dehydrated the garlic scapes; food processed them up and then mixed it with salt so we can use it throughout the year.”

Other shoppers and vendors offered these ideas:

--Stir-fry them with greens and lots of olive oil.

--Put them in a pasta salad with good, fresh tomatoes and burrata on top.

--Make pesto with them by combining garlic scapes and basil, substituting almonds for pine nuts, and adding olive oil, parsley, salt, and pepper.

--Sautee garlic scales in olive oil with local shiitake mushrooms and serve over smashed fried potatoes.

By the time I left, I was salivating and ready to commit to every meal containing scapes until I’ve tried it all.

Here's an in- depth guide to cooking with garlic scapes: https://foragerchef.com/garlic-scapes/