by Sam Philips, Lisa Giroday and Maxim Winther | Because everything in the garden pertaining to planting and harvest is ahead of schedule this year, we find ourselves now at the tail end of garlic scape season instead of the beginning (depending on when you planted garlic in the fall). So if you haven’t already gotten your fill of scapes, get on it now.

If you’re new to the scape, they’re the flower stalks of hard neck garlic plants. When they emerge, they’re often cut off from the plant, not only for the delicious scapes themselves, but also because cutting them off encourages developing bulbs. To get the best flavour and texture, cut them when they’re forming their first circle of growth. If they’re bigger, just cut off the woody part of the stalk just as you would with asparagus.

While we aren’t chefs (not by any stretch of the imagination ), cooking up veggies is obviously synonymous with our food growing profession, so people often ask us about preparation. Here are our top five ideas for how to deal with your scape harvest:

1. Grilled | Fry these bad boys up — just a couple minutes on each side with a drizzle of olive oil, sea salt and lemon will do the trick. The pungent garlic flavour of raw scapes mellows drastically when they’re grilled, and the texture is reminiscent of asparagus.

2. Pesto | One of our go-to green “recipes” (if you want to call it that, as it’s random and changes every time depending on what’s overabundant in the garden) is a basic pesto. Add some arugula, basil, dill, other herbs, some olive oil, salt, pepper, and apple cider vinegar, and there you go. Add it to a sanga, pasta, eggs, whatever!

3. Scape Butter | Make a scape compound butter and maybe add a little lemon and thyme. Use when frying up veggies, fish, whatever. Best application: garlic scape bread!

4. Scape Hummus | You can use scapes in lieu of pretty much anything you’d use garlic for. For a small batch of hummus, add approximately 4 scapes.

5. Pickle It | We prefer apple cider vinegar as a pickling liquid (even better fermented in a saltwater brine).

THE VICTORY GARDENS ARCHIVE