Wild Garlic Hummus

Our fresh green wild garlic hummus is a special seasonal spring treat! It works amazingly well, simply replacing garlic with its wild counterpart.

We love wild garlic as much as we love hummus, though it’s only seasonally available. So it was an obvious choice for us to try out a wild garlic hummus! This variation of a basic hummus recipe replaces the regular garlic with wild garlic. The wild garlic leaves add an amazingly fresh taste and bright green colour to the creamy hummus texture. It reminds me of Austria, where garlicky sharp and tangy spreads are a popular thing in spring time.

Making your own hummus

We love hummus. We eat a lot of it! And even more now that we make it ourselves. Once we made several kilograms of it for our friends’ wedding buffet. Making your own hummus is not only easy and cost-effective, it also helps reduce your plastic waste! I’ve always found it a shame that manufacturers put so little hummus in a plastic tub, when all I want to do is spoon it right out of the container. So, making your own hummus spares the world another plastic tub in the landfill and lets you make more hummus than you can eat – challenge accepted, or what!?

Making your own hummus is:

• easy
• quick
• cheap
• fun
• reduces plastic waste!
• allows you to flavour it however you like

No matter how much we love hummus, after a while it can get a bit boring if you use the same recipe over and over. Turns out, I can get enough of plain hummus after all. So we like to spice things up a little, or add some fresh herbs – if you like coriander, check out this adzuki bean hummus recipe!

Wild Garlic – a foraged spring delicacy

In spring time, there are great many delightful things to forage. One of them, which my grandma introduced me to back in Austria, is wild garlic. It has a flavour that I would describe as somewhere between regular garlic and spring onion. It grows in certain spots in deciduous forests. The spots can be hard to find, but once you come upon one, you can rely on it to be overgrowing with wild garlic every year come spring. See our guide on how to forage wild garlic!

The combination of hummus and wild garlic works so well because all you do is swap one kind of garlic with another! A difference is in the amount. The wild garlic hummus celebrates and emphasises the fresh green leafy flavour of the wild garlic, so we add enough of to properly inform your taste buds of its presence.

Besides the exchange of regular garlic with its wild counterpart, our wild garlic hummus recipe follows the same basic way of making regular hummus. To the core ingredients of cooked chickpeas and tahini (sesame paste), we just add the washed and chopped wild garlic, some lemon juice, salt, and olive oil. A little bit of cumin rounds off the taste nicely without being too present.

Tips for using wild garlic

Before using wild garlic, be sure that you wash it very thoroughly! This is especially important when you use the wild garlic raw. Growing low in the forests, it is exposed to all sorts of wild animals and whatever bugs they might carry. You should wash wild garlic even if you plan to cook it.

When blending wild garlic, like in this hummus recipe, it is very useful to chop it rather finely at first, to help your food processor along and to keep it from getting tangled up around the blades. We know from experience what a pain it is to repeatedly remove the stringy green bits of plant from the blender blades – just because we thought we could get away with blending the leaves whole!

Our wild garlic hummus can be enjoyed with raw vegetable sticks, on crackers, bread, with baked potatoes… It is a great special treat for opening picnic season. Great to be able to eat outside again! 🙂

If you like our wild garlic hummus recipe, then we promise you will LOVE our wild garlic pesto recipe too!

Have you ever picked wild garlic? How do you use it? What are your favourite things to forage in spring? Let us know in the comments!

Happy hummus-ing!

Love,
Paul & Sophie