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the endgame of this youtube channel is absolutely adam running a self sustaining homestead filled with weird food and farming related science experiments
I never ate it but I remember ripping up patches of this stuff as a kid and realizing that it smelled like onions, so I started using "onion grass" in all of my elaborate leaf potions. It's crazy to learn as an adult now that it actually was completely edible!
Allium vineale produces little bulbils in place of flowers (if you let it develop) - the bulbils are about the size of wheat grains and I think they might be good to add to rice or barley at some midpoint of cooking. I keep meaning to try it - maybe this year...
Its my headcanon now that your the batman of wild alliums. Whenever i see or think of wild garlic or foraging, your voice always whispers in the back of my mind "This can be quite tasty, but this one will most certainly kill you"
If you particularly like the taste of those wild field garlic plants, you should try them right before they flower. The garlic flower stem, or "scape" as it is called gets very sweet, almost tomato-ey sweet in my experience. Very delicious, although you do have to wait until around May until they start doing that. Since you're in Tennessee it'll probably be a bit earlier in the month or maybe even late April. Although "wait" is a relative term, there's always more of these plants than anyone knows what to do with anyway.
my mother knows how to find them here in turkey. i think best way to eat them is get a fistfull of them and start eating it raw. it is unbelivibly painful and enjoyable.
I cultivate some chives in my yard, and I particularly like to collect the purple blossoms immediately after blooming, then freezing them to use through the winter. I agree they are very sweet, almost like eating a Vidalia onion, and it also kinda tastes like what a flower smells like, very pleasant. I know the local honey bees dig the nectar from the blossoms too, they are swarming around the chive patch.
In some places, restaurants that raised their own chickens, ducks, or geese gave the birds a very rich diet of herbs and spices, which was found to actually change the flavor of their meat.
As a fellow Tennesseean I’ve seen a ton of these things. Ya know what Adam, you should do an experiment. Raise a cow on a lot of onion grass, then see if you can churn garlic butter out of the milk. 😂
There is a farmer down here in Florida who feeds his pigs lots of onions and garlic along with other stuff. Some of the best tasting pork I have ever had.
I have had grass fed beef that had previously consumed a lot of crow garlic. The taste is not good at all. The "garlic" nature is apparent, but it's really not the same as beef that has been seasoned with garlic.
I actually protected one of them when it sprouted in our yard, I didn’t let my dad mow it. I named it Gerald, and Gerald was awesome. It grew huge, and come autumn it made a beautiful purple spikeball-shaped flower and scattered its seeds everywhere. Needless to say, the next spring we had a LOT more Geralds popping up in the yard. Never knew you could eat them though. I suspected it but I didn’t trust myself enough to try.
At our old house, wild onions and garlic grew everywhere, and I always HATED mowing the lawn because when we would get to the spot where they liked to grow it would burn my eyes just like chopping onion in a kitchen
@@dotacow22 Gus johnsons ex-fiancée recently came with some horroble stories about his emotional abuse, of which he has since admitted his guilt. I highly suggest you watch her video
Maybe don't chop the garlic then. Grass mowing is overrated anyway. Once or twice a year is enough. Let wild plants reclaim some space and keep a path clear for yourself. The result is a vibrant garden full of color and life.
I once worked on a lady’s house and noticed that every time I walked across the yard I smelled garlic. Turns out that the lady’s father had had a garden in the back yard and he raised a lot of garlic. He died unexpectedly and the yard sat unattended for about 10 years. When the daughter got the place, she had to have a mountain of weeds cut out and removed and then she just had the ground tilled. She planted grass that came out in a nice lawn. But a huge amount of garlic had been growing there and it got spread all over the yard when they tilled the soil. Every year they mowed the garlic right along with the grass. Over time the grass started dying off and the garlic survived. It was a real pleasure to walk across the yard! She called it her pizza yard because she let thyme, oregano and other aromatic herbs grow there too.
"They didn't get poisoned because they spit out the bitter plant! Evolution works!" "These taste delicious, though a little bitter compared to domestic alleums."
That's right, and you can eat less of them than domestic before becoming sick. And you can eat more of them than that other, much more bitter plant, without becoming sick. Seems evolution is right on the money with this one.
In case anyone is actually confused, we’re talking the difference between the slight bitterness you find in something like spinach compared to the all-consuming, soul-shaking bitterness of an industrial bathroom cleaner.
"Ooh maybe I should try and find some wild onion right now!" *Steps outside to see all the grass is covered by 1.5+ meters of snow cover "Ah, right. Canadian prairies."
@@SimonWoodburyForget no good hardwoods at all, really. It's all poplar, aspen, and coniferous trees with the odd stand of birch. Makes it a bitch when barbecue is your passion and you have to pay through the nose for good smokewood. The apple and cherry trees at the cabin are more valuable as fruit trees than cutting down for feeding the pit, and they grow pretty slowly.
When I lived in Oklahoma we would go out in the woods and pick wild enables. They were often buried under leaves & I was the only one who could smell the wild onions. We usually made omelets with them.
From NC. I have distinct memories of siting by a creek eating wild onion we washed off in the running water after breakfast during sleepovers. Can't say it was the healthiest method but as kids it was incredibly fun and maybe the dirt helped boost my immune system.
No kidding, I really think it does. I can't help thinking that many of the illnesses that are common today are a result of our tendency to try to sterilize everything, to the detriment of our gut flora. We drank milk from the cow with no ill effects (and oh! The cream!), berries from the fields and woods, and never obsessed about the fact that our hands may not have been thoroughly washed first. Today I'm 80, and I love foraging.
@@morgan0 get the de worming medicine then kek. Better be infected briefly than never be infected at all. Would you rather have some itchy butts or IBS like disease?
My parents taught me what wild onions are when I was a very young boy. They’re incredibly easy to identify, they’re likely the safest and simplest wild green that anyone could forage, and they’re some of the first to poke out of the ground and some of the last to wither away. Literally anyone can spot it, and it’s good food almost year-round. My parents, being immigrants, taught it to me as ‘szczypiorek’. For a time, that’s all I knew it by. I didn’t know that the English translation was ‘chives’. One time, I was waiting for the school bus, when I spotted a distinct hollow sprig of foliage poking out of the ground, slightly curly in a way that grass just does not curl. Thinking nothing of it, I plucked it, and proceeded to place it in my mouth just as the bus arrived. Wild onions are a little on the fibrous side, especially mature ones. They’re best had finely chopped like chives, but they’ll break down with enough chewing. And so, chew I did. And as I got on the bus, I was greeted “Eww!”s and jeers all around me. Apparently they thought I was eating grass. The bus driver refused to get the bus rolling until I had come up to the front to spit it out, and threatened me with suspension if I swallowed it. I tried to explain that this is a vegetable, similar to green onions. I called it szczypiorek. The driver looked at me like I was making up gibberish. And once it was spat out in the trash, she berated me in front of the whole bus, straight up yelling at me that I had best not ever try to eat grass again, and how disgusting I was for doing that. One kid, literally only one kid, took my side. His dad happened to be a chef, and he identified it as chives. He was the only one that thought it was a neat skill to identify wild chives. I learned what chives were that day, and I also got a taste of how much I truly hate the average bologna-on-Wonderbread munching shithead. I carry it with me to this day, and I get unreasonably angry when I see things like a woman who forages greens appear on “Extreme Cheapskates”, or listen to geriatric Boomers make jokes about broccoli being from a different planet. Fuck you, learn what vegetables are.
To be fair, broccoli only makes sense once you realize that it's just a bunch of flowers that haven't bloomed yet. Without that context it's pretty much the weirdest looking vegetable other than maybe artichokes - another unbloomed flower. We're used to roots, stalks, and leaves. Most Americans don't eat a lot of flowers. Sorry you got picked on for knowing how to find a free snack though.
@@melanieniemann4160 I really don’t understand how you can defend that. Neither broccoli nor artichokes look even vaguely weird. Broccoli is one of the most common vegetables in North America; it’s got tons of context. Every vegetable has its own shape. Broccoli isn’t special here, especially when you consider there are similar vegetables like cauliflower. You say Americans eat root vegetables, but try showing a celeriac to someone. You might as well be handing them the egg of an extraterrestrial monstrosity. Or, see if they can tell the difference between a parsley root, a parsnip, and a white carrot, or if they can tell the difference between celery, angelica, fennel, and cardoons. We live in a country where kids grow up assuming carrots grow on trees, and become positively disgusted when they finally learn carrots are pulled from the dirt. We live in a country that has entire regions where people distinguish between white bread and wheat bread, and get confused if you say whole wheat. They don’t grasp that white flour also comes from wheat. Wheat to them is just something brown and bitter you add to bread because doctors say it’s good for you. It’s got caramel color and no fiber? It’s brown, which means it’s wheat bread! It’s good for you! American food culture is completely broken. And while the more bourgeois segments of society are steadily waking up to what was lost in the middle of the 20th century, a wide swath of America is still eating crap. That’s all they know, and it’s all they care to know.
@@luke_fabis Sure, most Americans won't know what to DO with celeriac, but they will recognize it as part of a plant. Broccoli/cauliflower/artichokes look weird to some people because they're a part of a plant you'll never see unless you're actively paying attention to nature. Unopened flowers aren't colorful and attention grabbing enough to be noticed without actually looking. I imagine that the person in who said broccoli looked like it was from another planet had never done any gardening and only ever paid attention to flowers once they had opened. If I didn't know that broccoli was a collection of unopened flowers/had never seen, say, hydrangeas before their flowers open I'd think it was a pretty strange plant too. Is it sad that we don't stop to pay attention to the world around us? Yes, but blaming people for what they don't know isn't going to help anyone.
@@melanieniemann4160 I really don’t follow what you’re saying here. Broccoli is much more recognizable as a plant than celeriac. For starters, it’s green and has leaves. I don’t blame people for being ignorant, but I absolutely blame them if they lack the curiosity and intellectual honesty to fill in their gaps.
8:02..... ahhhhh Emril. He's such a great guy from what I've heard. Real down to earth too. I miss watching his shows, not that I even own a TV anymore anyways.
I always remember seeing both wild onions and "wild strawberries" growing in my backyard. My grandpa always warned me they were toxic, but it turns out many of these things are not toxic and exactly what you would think they are... wild versions of the domesticated produce we eat today!
I assume you are talking about the false strawberry (Potentilla indica). Completely flavorless to me, but completely edible. For some reason kids seem to love it, though. I think it is the novelty of strawberries growing in the yard.
@@rogervanaman6739 Wild strawberries (the fragarias) and false strawberries (potentillas) are different things - strawberries are bred from the collection of various wild strawberry plants that are native across the entirety of the northern hemisphere. Actual wild strawberry is as a general rule quite delicious, but they are small and take forever to pick in comparison to strawberries. But they are either native or naturalised pretty much everywhere the legates live, so they might very well actually be talking about wild strawberry.
I get the feeling parents say this because they're too lazy to identify plants properly and just lie to their kids that they're poison, lol My parents didn't do that, thankfully
One of my memories from early childhood was going out with my family, grandparents, and aunt/uncle/cousins and gather a bunch of wild onions. Then going back to my grandparents house and my grandmother would make wild onion dumplings in chicken stock and oyster soup.
I remember discovering "grass that smelled like onions" when I was in 1st grade. It was early spring and we were at recess, sitting on the ground, playing under a catalpa tree (before I knew the name of those, either). I was running my fingers through the nice green "grass" and it smelled like onions! I've chewed on them occasionally but never picked any to use while cooking!
Last summer, I bought and planted two pots of a plant from a farmer's market that look just like that. They called it 'Garlic Chives', but I'm not certain exactly what it is - sounds a lot like what you're describing. Tastes like garlic plus 'green', and is more fibrous than store-bought chives. They grew great all summer, and I'd usually grab a handful every time I went outside. I'm from North Dakota, so maybe that's just the regional slang for it up here. Anyways, love your content! Keep 'em coming.
Garlic chives are Allium tuberosum aka A.chinense. They are native to eastern Asia and do very well here in southern Ontario. They can invade your lawn if you don't clip off the seed heads before they mature seed, and they also spread out as a clump. They have pretty white flowers in late summer. I think they might be winter hardy in your area too. Enjoy!
@@b.a.erlebacher1139 I got garlic chives last year and thank heavens I decided to keep them as houseplants instead of planting them in the yard. Invasive species are super unwelcome around where I live. Thanks for the info!
@@b.a.erlebacher1139 I've got some plants that were also called "garlic chives" but these ones have light-purple flowers. They're flowering right now (southern hemisphere summer).
I used to love going out and plucking up wild onions and just munching on them after a quick rinse. These days I love the garlicky smell after mowing my lawn. I also always collect the seeds when they finally do go to seed and spread them around my yard and garden beds.
Unfortunately my luck that the semi abandoned wetland near me, which I thought was full of ramps, turns out to all be the poisonous lookalikes. Thankfully I learned the easy way and not the hard way.
In Germany (especially in the center of the country) at around this time of the year in some forests there's an explosion of "Bärlauch" (lit. Bear garlic, colloquially known in English as wild garlic). It's amazing, you walk in the forest and suddenly the air smells strongly of onion. People make pesto out of the leaves, and it's delicious. One stroll in the forest can yield a week's worth of pesto material. And just like you said, some poisonous plants can be mistaken for Bärlauch, mainly "Maiglöckschen" (aka Lilly of the valley).
It's in Swiss forests too! They're different than the onion grass, they have big flat leaves instead, but are just as yummy! It's very cool to see whole groves of the stuff dozens of meters across just off of the path. Makes the whole air smell of garlic, very nice.
Every time I get into a particular subject and go to learn more about it, you make a video doing a great job covering it. I literally picked some wild garlic today and wondered more about it and I get home from the kitchen to see this wonderful video ! Thank you for your knowledge and insight into the culinary world!
In Germany, they're called "Schnittlauch" which translates to "Cut Leek" suggesting it shares some ancestry with leek. You can even buy them in seed packets here and plant them in your garden but I've never seen so much of it grow in the wild like in your video. Never mind I just googled wtf allium means...
schnittlauch = chives (the kind you can buy in a store) but you can find Bärlauch (translates to " Bear Leek") which is pretty much wild garlic and it is growling like crazy in a lot of German Forests
@@dionn6909 early spring ptsd from everything having bärlauch in it. It‘s really tasty but damn do you taste it and smell like it (sweat) for quite some time
@@dionn6909 bärlauch is ramslök in Swedish. Absolutely love it but almost every dish has it during those spring weeks they are fresh. Might be a good thing it is a few weeks per year we can have them.
@@dionn6909 A better translation for _Bärlauch_ is _Bear Garlic,_ especially when Garlic is called _Knoblauch_ (knob "leek"). The German word _Lauch_ is just a lot more versatile than the English equivalent.
I actually tried to grow a local wild onion variety (probably allium Carmeli) at home and I have to say that it's completely worth it. These plants are much more resilient than cultivated varieties so just natural watering from the rain and poor soil is enough to produce long and strong leaves (around 30 cm each), and they also are more pungent than store stuff, although not as strong as some other varieties that I haven't managed to get my hands on yet like allium Neapolitans. I never thought about using the bulbs, but now I'm probably going to try to do that with the older plants, especially considering that they are very easy to breed, each plant taking around 2 seasons to reach maturity from a seed. In short, it's a worthwhile project at least as some sort of gardening practice, that also has a direct reward in a form of literal loads of vitamins and all this good stuff. For better results it's also possible to grow those together with legumes, this way the onions will protect legumes from pests and legumes will aerate and enrich the soil with nitrates and organics, something that will be hard to do otherwise, at least without disrupting the plants - bulbs stay in the ground for a couple of seasons. Edit: if you ask why I even thought about that - I'm too lazy to go two floors to the garden in wadi to actually collect the wild stuff
Flat blade => generally closer to a garlic Tube blade => generally closer to an onion Some flat leaves can taste oniony & some tube leaves can taste garlicky. Alliums that don't smell are usually poisonous, & some that do smell slightly may also be mildly toxic The city of Chicago was named by Algonquin natives "skunk" because of it's huge onion fields. Wild alliums remain a precious commodity for natives of many nations even today
When I was little, I had great memories of the extremely dense woods behind my childhood home. Almost like a painting, there was a small clearing maybe two meters in diameter, where the sun shone through the trees, and wild onions grew so strong that you could smell them far away, and made a shaggy carpet of green. Unfortunately as I got older, poison ivy grew rampant through the whole woods and took over that clearing as well, but I still remember what it looked & smelled like.
Video idea that you can totally take Adam, the difference between dark and white meat, why they taste different, why they need different cooking times, either debunking or reinforcing the notion that white meat is healthier and should be used in everything, and how that is effecting chickens and the chicken industry as a whole, and the benefits/drawbacks of replacing chicken breast with chicken thighs in recipes, which is something I've been doing for months and love it
In Scandinavia, the bulb of a flower is actually called the same as an onion. So if you for instance wanted to plant tulips, you'd buy tulip-onions to plant :) Danish: Tulipanløg Norwegian: Tulipanløk Swedish: Tulpanlök
Where I live there's plenty of wild alliums all year round. In spring there's wild garlic in the forests, in summer, my chives come up, in autumn this allium I don't know the name of comes up near rocky coastal cliff areas, there's so many tasty alliums!
Paresthesia is pronounced like anesthesia, they both come from the same Greek root of “aisthesia” meaning feeling or sensation and then modified with a prefix (“a-“ meaning a lack of or “para” meaning abnormal). Paresthesias (plural) means that there were several distinct areas of the body that felt tingly instead of just one area or it being the entire body as a whole.
If you don't already have them in your garden there are some easy alliums you can introduce. Chives (A.schoenprasum) has purple flowers in late spring. Garlic chives (A.tuberosum aka A.chinense) will invade your lawn quite successfully and has white flowers in late summer. Don't let it set seed if you don't want it in your lawn. If you grow hardneck garlic and let the scaphe mature, it will make a clump of tiny bulbils at the top of the scaphe. Plant these (just sprinkle them on the ground and rake them in) and you'll have lots of green garlic in the spring, small single clove garlic in late summer, and full size bulbs the next year. As Adam mentioned, topsetting onions (A. x proliferum) look wonderfully weird and will keep you in green onions for life with almost no effort. I'm in southern Ontario, and these things work for me.
I didn't realize anybody didn't know this. I just thought that was part of childhood, your mom or dad explained there were onions in the yard, showed you how to pull em out, and for about a week you were super thrilled with the idea of helping make dinner.... And your parents got you to do some weeding without it sounding like real work.
when i was in preschool we had show and tell. at my house we had just moved to another house and one of the things that we got when we moved (less than a block away) was wild garlic. so that was my show and tell in preschool. i have loved it ever since.
I enjoyed this video, topic, and even the ad. The ad read blindsided me in the most entertaining way haha. Even considering how smooth they tend to be around here, that was very impressive. Good work Adam
Ooh I remember when I was a kid, I was pulling random weeds during recess, and being super excited when I found those ‘onions’. Some other kids joined me and we would show our teachers the handfuls of onions we picked. They did not appreciate the oniony smell in their classrooms, but I think they were glad we were having fun.
The ones around me are the Nodding onion and they are small like the one you dug up and are sweet like a red onion but sharper like a shallot. Also, there is a wild meadow near me that was cultivated by the native americans where they weeded out the death camas and encouraged the edible camas and strawberries to grow. Every year the purple camas bloom giving quite the show.
My dad and I used to pull these up at our old vacation home on Lake Hartwell in SC. Big handful of the green sprigs on our sandwiches for lunch, tasty stuff. Thanks for bringing back memories with another great video
these are not so common in the UK! but we do have something we call wild garlic, or ramsons, which is a broad leaf allium - just starting to come up now. Wizz with oil and any sort of nut and you get the best garlic pesto!
I have a ton of wild garlic all over my apartment complex. I do have a chive plant but the wild garlics all stayed green through the winter while mine went dormant in its pot. Loved using them as free chives with baked potatoes.
Me: Gathering wild alliums sounds like fun Adam: A man from Northern Arizona got wildly ill eating something he mistook for garlic Me, living in Northern AZ: Guess I gotta be careful Adam: Buy life insurance Me: Maybe no wild allium for me...
If it smells like and looks like alliums, then it is alliums. It's really easy to identify. I think this dad just put it in his mouth without smelling and then swallowed.
My wife and I used wild onions to season fresh trout when camping at about 7,000’ in the Rockies. They were growing in high valleys in large numbers and were tougher than domestic varieties obviously, but a really neat and hardy plant to find and use in the wilderness and tasted great.
Lol I remember growing up and playing on the playground during recess I would rip me up some onions from the ground and just start munchin’ 😂 I felt like I discovered the elusive “wild onion” all on my own
Me and best friend would often play with this during recess in elementary school. I have distinct memories of bringing home a bird nest we made of onion grass.
I find it really funny reading everyone's story of finding "grass that smells like onion". I've never had anything similar. Guess the tropical climate here isn't very suitable for them :(
@Adam Ragusea , it's common, older wisdom like this that keeps me coming back. Now, if only I could find and spread "ramps" in my yard and garden. My whole life, I've heard of these Native American Alliums, and haven't ever tasted one.
My old man and his family had a dairy cow at home. She got into a pen which my grandad hadn’t cleared of alliums. Really ruined their breakfast and tea the next morning lol
After substituting wild onions for chives in a dish which got rave reviews at a church potluck years ago, I've often cooked with yard onions when they're sprouting in late winter and spring in northeast Mississippi.
I remember when I was younger finding those little onions, and I ate them some times, once I found one that looked more orange and not white and tried it and it made my mouth numb it was so bitter so I spit it out, good to know what that was now
In Germany we eat a lot of Chives (called Schnittlauch here). It's pretty similar if not the same, right? It grows everywhere over here and I like to snack it when on a walk in the forest :D
Thanks for this video, Adam. One thing I like about invasives is that you can basically harvest with abandon. In contrast, native ramps can take seven years to reach maturity, so when foraging for those, it's a good idea to snip the greens and leave the bulbs!
I'm in the coastal zone in Northern California. I have two main patches of wild Allium. The blades are much like a spring onion, but are triangular in cross section, and a bit more fibrous. They are also about to flower (March 7th). The white flowers are incredible added to a fresh salad or anywhere a touch of onion/garlic would be good fresh. I've even sauteed them with butter for an incredible shrimp or octopus scampi. My next foraging adventure will be nettles. So happy for Spring!
I enjoy the Allium vineale in so many ways. Of course the green "chives" are great fresh, but I freeze a lot and dry some, too, after cutting them into small bits, to use all year. I look for the scapes (the flower stalks that shoot up from the individual bulbs) to sautee later in the spring. It does take practice to see them in tall grass of unmowed areas, which is where they will be (mowing will keep them from putting up the scapes). If you miss the scapes, on the A. vineale, there aren't flowers, but little bulblets. Those are great in potatoes, and there sure can be a lot of them. Let them dry and they keep a long time. And the larger underground bulbs are really great in honey. I just clean the bulbs and put them in honey, so it's super easy to do. They get sweet and the honey gets a garlic flavor that is great on wild greens. The bulbs are great in a cream sauce, too, so good. It's nice to use the whole plant (chopped up) in soups, too. Allium vineale is so abundant and so under appreciated. And we can harvest as much as we want because they are considered invasive. Even for people that don't have a good sense of smell, an dinstinctive way to ID the A. vineale is to look for the little ridges on the round hollow stems. Happy foraging!
I don't know much about plants, but I know that around where I live there's lots of people that go pick wild onions/garlic or something similar to that. They sometimes confuse them with lily of the valley (before they started blooming) and get sick, because those are toxic (I think). Some recipes that I've seen require large amounts and if one or two are not wild onions they don't notice it that much.
I don't know how much is dangerous, but I've been foraging bear garlic for a couple of years and I'm pretty confident that if you pick the best leaves there's no chance of mistakes, the problem is people clearing a small area assuming all the plants are the same. Well worth investigating your local patch, but also well worth looking at lily of the valley, it's quite easy to tell the difference even for novices
@@Bullsquid592 thanks for the info :). I don't go foraging, it's something my mom told me. I'm a very careful person so I tend to fret too much if I would.
@@Bullsquid592 Yes, lucky you, bear garlic (Allium ursinum) or 'ramps' are a super delicacy. They are easy to distinguish because, of course, they smell like garlic. Like any plant or mushroom we forage, it's important to inspect each one to be sure we haven't picked up a lookalike or an intruder. There are so many delicious 'weeds' out there to enjoy, and most people just pull them up and throw them away. Everyone should learn a few basic plants, though, so you can enjoy them without worrying. Dandelions and nettles are easy, then lamb's quarters, chickweed, garlic mustard, plantain, sorrel, hairy bittercress...delicious!
Yes, Lily of the Valley are poisonous. If you have the garlic and Lily of the Valley growing together, its too easy to get a Lily of the Valley leaf mixed in, so its too dangerous to forage there.
Discovered this last a few summers ago with my boyfriend. We were hanging out and gardening in his yard and I was picking some of the grass that had grown in the garden bed so it wouldn't steal nutrients from the flowers. It smelled like onions, so I googled it to see if it was safe and I tried some. It was delicious and it turns out it's invasive in my area, so I've been adding some to my cooking ever since!
I'm extremely sensitive to bitter flavors, yet wild onion like this never bothers me. It tastes sweet and punchy, just like the domesticated variety. Another way to make them, which a wilderness channel mentioned, was roasting over a campfire. If you find these and manage to get a squirrel or rabbit, you've got a nice feast waiting back at camp. I believe I have what they call "'super taster" tastebuds. I can't stand any alcoholic tannins like beer and wine, or coffee/tea without plenty of sugar. Chocolate that isn't milk chocolate, even ones at only 30% cacao is too bitter. A lot of vegetables are too bitter, like celery, spinach, and asparagus. Carrots are extremely difficult to find edible because most taste like bitter dirt (but when I get a good one, oh boy is it a treat). On the other side, fructose is extremely powerful on my tongue, too. Any fruit is too sweet for me to stomach more than a single bite, combined with the bitterness that comes from the tannins to make for a really annoying flavor.
@@annbrookens945 Yeah, they've gotten really bad as I got older. I could get away with one or two slices of the candied ones we make at get togethers when I was 8, but now they're just bleh.
There are certain compounds only some people find bitter due to genetics. I suspect that what makes wild onion bitter is one such compound, and you simply can't taste it. I also don't find it bitter, and I find broccoli sweet, which is something that contains a compound some people find extremely bitter and others don't taste at all or very little.
When I was little it was my job to collect these from the yard! We had an organic garden and my dad loved to cook these and hated smelling like onions after mowing so it was a win-win! I got a nickel for every bulb I pulled up and I collected hundreds at a time!
In Dingle, Ireland they purportedly graze lambs on grass near the sea that gives the meat an already salted flavor. So… Why I Season my chop’s food, not my chop. Although, that would miss out on H E T E R O G E N E I T Y.
No. You cannot. He's obviously never had beef from a cow that was grazing on wild onions. Commercial farms go to great length to keep those things out of their fields. (We'd just keep any cow destined for the dinner table in the barn on grains for a week or two.)
@@ausore9832 Come to my farm. I'll give you a cow that's been grazing on wild onions. You will barf trying to eat that meat! If put in a barn to carefully meter what it eats, it's remotely possible to strike a balance, but that's an insanely expensive experiment. (that's the point of putting the cow to be eaten in the barn in the first place...)
A few years ago, I found a large patch of wild garlic next to a road so I ripped a bunch out of the ground and transferred it to my garden. Once separated, the wild garlic does form multi cloved bulbs which are small and quite pungent. Wild garlic that has bolted will have little bulblets post flowering and have a similar pungency to the cloves. But the flowers, before they form bulblets, have a very pleasant sweet garlic taste that works amazingly well as a garnish.
Foraging is both a skill and an artform. The artform comes from just being familiar with all the unique ways a single species can manifest, and the skill comes from knowing IF ITS BITTER DONT KEEP EATING IT.
Your transitions into your sponsered segments are always so good. For most TH-camrs, I can tell when they are going to start their sponsored segments. I never realize you've started your's until you say the name of the company, or you say, "This video is sponsored by..."
During the initial pandemic lockdown in April/May a former roommate and I had plenty of cans and dry goods stockpiled but had a lack of spices and were too afraid to go to the store in our city. Through research and some daring experimentation we figured out that the ones in our yard were edible. Wish I had just found this video, Thank you for bringing back that memory 💖
@@theslamjamfrincisco2820 I'm not about to go search it out and shove it in my mouth because science. It would just be nice to know whether it's an options for sudoku if I get desperate
I'm too cowardly to trust my identifications of any plants even in my garden. I think I have plenty of well established wild garlic. But will not be testing my surety any time soon. (We're also fighting knotweed in this garden with strong weedkillers)
The main trick is the smell, the garlicky oniony smell only comes from the allium family. There are several allium lookalikes depending which species you are looking for and there are good guides out there on what to be careful of but as Adam says, evolution works, if it tastes bad don't swallow it, there are very few plants poisonous enough to hurt from a taste but if it tastes like onion it's an onion. (Nothing else makes that oniony chemical)
I've been eating wild onions out of people's flowerbeds for years now. Don't think if found a poisonous look alike yet. Come to think of it though I probably wouldn't think it really looks alike.
I also have to fight my paranoid side when trying a new wild plant, but I'm making an effort and starting small. If I see a plant I recognize, I eat a small amount. Just what-ever I'm comfortable with. Once you've had it several times and know it doesn't hurt you, and what it's supposed to taste and smell like, it's not scary anymore. As @Ben M says; very few plants are poisonous enough that a small taste is dangerous. And I'll add: Even grocery store veges contain _tiny_ amounts of poisonous compounds, as herbivores/omnivores, our livers are designed to just deal with them. "Poisonous", is not an all-or-nothing state. It's a continuum.
Spring ramps are a delicacy in Ohio and Midwest region. As you said, it is important to differentiate between similar look-a-likes that grow in the same habitat, like lily-of-the-valley. The ramps have one or two leaves that have individual stems and LotV have multiple leaves that whorl around a single stem leading to flowers. Ramps don't flower until much later in the season. The strong onion smell is another telling ramp characteristic, as LotV don't smell. It's wild out there... Great video, Adam.
My fiance and I discovered garlic scrapes at our local farmers market last year. Pan frying them with some butter and oil and boy! Honestly our new favorite seasonal vegetable.
I started out watching your cooking videos and finding them very different and normal(its hard to explain). As I watched through the weeks I noticed that I would be watching videos that weren't about cooking(making a recipe) and enjoying them as well. it might be your tone or something but I just can't stop watching them.
Thanks to Policygenius for sponsoring this video! To start comparing quotes and simplify insurance-buying, check out
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Poli what
hello adam :) love your videos
Hey Adam I just wanted to say your beard and long hair look really great on you ;D
hi adam
I know there are mushrooms that smell good but are extremey deadly if eaten...what about those? Smells can be sometimes deceiving.
We are inching closer and closer to “why I season my land instead of my food”
Why I season my cow's feedstock, not it's meat.
Wait for him to make a gardening video, soils quality has a major impact on plant flavor
Lmao.
@@nyalan8385 i'm a botanist, it does
the endgame of this youtube channel is absolutely adam running a self sustaining homestead filled with weird food and farming related science experiments
I never ate it but I remember ripping up patches of this stuff as a kid and realizing that it smelled like onions, so I started using "onion grass" in all of my elaborate leaf potions.
It's crazy to learn as an adult now that it actually was completely edible!
You made a discovery the same way we have done for millennia. That still leads a question. Who was the 1st person to suck on a cow utter
lol
"Onion grass" is what we call chives here, Ruohosipuli
In scandinavia also, graslök
Same! i only recently discovered they're great with eggs when i ran out of parsley and wanted some green in my breakfast one morning
Allium vineale produces little bulbils in place of flowers (if you let it develop) - the bulbils are about the size of wheat grains and I think they might be good to add to rice or barley at some midpoint of cooking. I keep meaning to try it - maybe this year...
Love your channel Atomic Shrimp! Keep it up! I hope you and Adam are secretly immortal and will produce content for us forever
Love your foraging videos! Unfortunately most of the wild plants where I live are drenched in chemicals but it’s still fascinating to watch!
Its my headcanon now that your the batman of wild alliums.
Whenever i see or think of wild garlic or foraging, your voice always whispers in the back of my mind
"This can be quite tasty, but this one will most certainly kill you"
Atomic Shrimp! Much love
Of course my favorite british crustacean is top comment on a wild garlic video. Are these bulbils the same thing as scapes?
Between the yard syrup and the yard onions, I’m really enjoying this suburban-foraging arc.
yesss
Makes me wonder if a future video might be dandelion wine.
When I was a kid I remember chewing on the "onion grass" that grew in the backyard. Glad I wasn't doing something horribly wrong I guess.
plot twist: you were chewing on death amas and survived and now you have the strongest immune system known to man
Most of cooking is just the grown-up version of chewing on grass in the yard.
i used to do the same; or dig up the entire bulb and throw it in a flowerpot of rainwater as 'soup.' turns out, it actually was!
Hahaha this comment awakened long-forgotten memories for me
as long as you didn't have dogs
If you particularly like the taste of those wild field garlic plants, you should try them right before they flower. The garlic flower stem, or "scape" as it is called gets very sweet, almost tomato-ey sweet in my experience. Very delicious, although you do have to wait until around May until they start doing that. Since you're in Tennessee it'll probably be a bit earlier in the month or maybe even late April. Although "wait" is a relative term, there's always more of these plants than anyone knows what to do with anyway.
my mother knows how to find them here in turkey. i think best way to eat them is get a fistfull of them and start eating it raw. it is unbelivibly painful and enjoyable.
I cultivate some chives in my yard, and I particularly like to collect the purple blossoms immediately after blooming, then freezing them to use through the winter. I agree they are very sweet, almost like eating a Vidalia onion, and it also kinda tastes like what a flower smells like, very pleasant. I know the local honey bees dig the nectar from the blossoms too, they are swarming around the chive patch.
Ive tried them. They taste like a milder garlic. I didnt really taste sweetness. Maybe its just me or they werent the sweet ones
I love the scapes of chives and onions i pick them off my plants wile weeding absolutely delicious
Yes very common in Chinese cuisine
"This guy almost died eating a poisonous plant, so buy life insurance!" Great segue lol
6:29 "Why I flavor my cow NOT my steak" is now possible!
ye
Lmao😂
In some places, restaurants that raised their own chickens, ducks, or geese gave the birds a very rich diet of herbs and spices, which was found to actually change the flavor of their meat.
As a fellow Tennesseean I’ve seen a ton of these things. Ya know what Adam, you should do an experiment. Raise a cow on a lot of onion grass, then see if you can churn garlic butter out of the milk. 😂
There is a farmer down here in Florida who feeds his pigs lots of onions and garlic along with other stuff. Some of the best tasting pork I have ever had.
@@lucasrubinstein923 In general, herbs, in the best case a kind of natural grassland, are better for the animals and meat quality.
I have had grass fed beef that had previously consumed a lot of crow garlic. The taste is not good at all. The "garlic" nature is apparent, but it's really not the same as beef that has been seasoned with garlic.
It will flavor the milk of dairy cows, and will flavor the breast milk of a nursing mother. Having been one, I can attest to that.
I actually protected one of them when it sprouted in our yard, I didn’t let my dad mow it. I named it Gerald, and Gerald was awesome. It grew huge, and come autumn it made a beautiful purple spikeball-shaped flower and scattered its seeds everywhere.
Needless to say, the next spring we had a LOT more Geralds popping up in the yard.
Never knew you could eat them though. I suspected it but I didn’t trust myself enough to try.
At our old house, wild onions and garlic grew everywhere, and I always HATED mowing the lawn because when we would get to the spot where they liked to grow it would burn my eyes just like chopping onion in a kitchen
Maybe change ur profile picture
@@tygokooijman1476 ?
@@dotacow22 Gus johnsons ex-fiancée recently came with some horroble stories about his emotional abuse, of which he has since admitted his guilt. I highly suggest you watch her video
whenever I mow the lawn it smells like lemons because the lemon tree drops lemon fruit everywhere... it is lovely
Maybe don't chop the garlic then. Grass mowing is overrated anyway. Once or twice a year is enough. Let wild plants reclaim some space and keep a path clear for yourself. The result is a vibrant garden full of color and life.
I once worked on a lady’s house and noticed that every time I walked across the yard I smelled garlic. Turns out that the lady’s father had had a garden in the back yard and he raised a lot of garlic. He died unexpectedly and the yard sat unattended for about 10 years. When the daughter got the place, she had to have a mountain of weeds cut out and removed and then she just had the ground tilled. She planted grass that came out in a nice lawn. But a huge amount of garlic had been growing there and it got spread all over the yard when they tilled the soil. Every year they mowed the garlic right along with the grass. Over time the grass started dying off and the garlic survived. It was a real pleasure to walk across the yard! She called it her pizza yard because she let thyme, oregano and other aromatic herbs grow there too.
A pizza yard! How lovely!
"They didn't get poisoned because they spit out the bitter plant! Evolution works!"
"These taste delicious, though a little bitter compared to domestic alleums."
I laughed at that part too.
That's right, and you can eat less of them than domestic before becoming sick.
And you can eat more of them than that other, much more bitter plant, without becoming sick.
Seems evolution is right on the money with this one.
I never really understood the difference between "ew, bitter" and "mmm, bitter"
@@vigilantcosmicpenguin8721 a limitation of language perhaps.
In case anyone is actually confused, we’re talking the difference between the slight bitterness you find in something like spinach compared to the all-consuming, soul-shaking bitterness of an industrial bathroom cleaner.
Adam never fails to deliver great info! So awesome.
Along with crazy good promo transitions. That life insurance insert was genius lol
I Think his journalism backround plays a great role in this, his texts are always A+
@@JGB_Wentworth I watch Adam primarily because I enjoy his promo transitions.
I could say the same about you!
This man could convince me that i should sleep with my bed upside down
"Ooh maybe I should try and find some wild onion right now!"
*Steps outside to see all the grass is covered by 1.5+ meters of snow cover
"Ah, right. Canadian prairies."
You too, eh?
Frozen onion.
@@SimonWoodburyForget no maples in Alberta.
@@SimonWoodburyForget no good hardwoods at all, really. It's all poplar, aspen, and coniferous trees with the odd stand of birch. Makes it a bitch when barbecue is your passion and you have to pay through the nose for good smokewood. The apple and cherry trees at the cabin are more valuable as fruit trees than cutting down for feeding the pit, and they grow pretty slowly.
When I lived in Oklahoma we would go out in the woods and pick wild enables. They were often buried under leaves & I was the only one who could smell the wild onions. We usually made omelets with them.
Enablers are the worst
@@petesahad3028 Always ruining diet plans. "Honey, I'm going on a diet". Honey: Hey, want some of this (insert thing not in their diet)?
@@petesahad3028 enablers & saboteurs are equally bad
From NC. I have distinct memories of siting by a creek eating wild onion we washed off in the running water after breakfast during sleepovers. Can't say it was the healthiest method but as kids it was incredibly fun and maybe the dirt helped boost my immune system.
No kidding, I really think it does. I can't help thinking that many of the illnesses that are common today are a result of our tendency to try to sterilize everything, to the detriment of our gut flora. We drank milk from the cow with no ill effects (and oh! The cream!), berries from the fields and woods, and never obsessed about the fact that our hands may not have been thoroughly washed first. Today I'm 80, and I love foraging.
dirt can also give you small worms in your gut, and probably some other stuff too. i had that when i was younger for years, was pretty unpleasant.
@@morgan0 it has been theorised that these tiny worms help moderate immune response and help stave off auto-immune disease.
@@mayurmahale3049 yeah well if they didn’t make my butt itch so bad at night i probably wouldn’t have cared as much about getting them out of me
@@morgan0 get the de worming medicine then kek. Better be infected briefly than never be infected at all. Would you rather have some itchy butts or IBS like disease?
My parents taught me what wild onions are when I was a very young boy. They’re incredibly easy to identify, they’re likely the safest and simplest wild green that anyone could forage, and they’re some of the first to poke out of the ground and some of the last to wither away. Literally anyone can spot it, and it’s good food almost year-round.
My parents, being immigrants, taught it to me as ‘szczypiorek’. For a time, that’s all I knew it by. I didn’t know that the English translation was ‘chives’.
One time, I was waiting for the school bus, when I spotted a distinct hollow sprig of foliage poking out of the ground, slightly curly in a way that grass just does not curl. Thinking nothing of it, I plucked it, and proceeded to place it in my mouth just as the bus arrived.
Wild onions are a little on the fibrous side, especially mature ones. They’re best had finely chopped like chives, but they’ll break down with enough chewing. And so, chew I did.
And as I got on the bus, I was greeted “Eww!”s and jeers all around me. Apparently they thought I was eating grass. The bus driver refused to get the bus rolling until I had come up to the front to spit it out, and threatened me with suspension if I swallowed it.
I tried to explain that this is a vegetable, similar to green onions. I called it szczypiorek. The driver looked at me like I was making up gibberish. And once it was spat out in the trash, she berated me in front of the whole bus, straight up yelling at me that I had best not ever try to eat grass again, and how disgusting I was for doing that.
One kid, literally only one kid, took my side. His dad happened to be a chef, and he identified it as chives. He was the only one that thought it was a neat skill to identify wild chives.
I learned what chives were that day, and I also got a taste of how much I truly hate the average bologna-on-Wonderbread munching shithead. I carry it with me to this day, and I get unreasonably angry when I see things like a woman who forages greens appear on “Extreme Cheapskates”, or listen to geriatric Boomers make jokes about broccoli being from a different planet. Fuck you, learn what vegetables are.
To be fair, broccoli only makes sense once you realize that it's just a bunch of flowers that haven't bloomed yet. Without that context it's pretty much the weirdest looking vegetable other than maybe artichokes - another unbloomed flower. We're used to roots, stalks, and leaves. Most Americans don't eat a lot of flowers.
Sorry you got picked on for knowing how to find a free snack though.
@@melanieniemann4160 I really don’t understand how you can defend that.
Neither broccoli nor artichokes look even vaguely weird. Broccoli is one of the most common vegetables in North America; it’s got tons of context. Every vegetable has its own shape. Broccoli isn’t special here, especially when you consider there are similar vegetables like cauliflower.
You say Americans eat root vegetables, but try showing a celeriac to someone. You might as well be handing them the egg of an extraterrestrial monstrosity.
Or, see if they can tell the difference between a parsley root, a parsnip, and a white carrot, or if they can tell the difference between celery, angelica, fennel, and cardoons.
We live in a country where kids grow up assuming carrots grow on trees, and become positively disgusted when they finally learn carrots are pulled from the dirt.
We live in a country that has entire regions where people distinguish between white bread and wheat bread, and get confused if you say whole wheat. They don’t grasp that white flour also comes from wheat. Wheat to them is just something brown and bitter you add to bread because doctors say it’s good for you. It’s got caramel color and no fiber? It’s brown, which means it’s wheat bread! It’s good for you!
American food culture is completely broken. And while the more bourgeois segments of society are steadily waking up to what was lost in the middle of the 20th century, a wide swath of America is still eating crap. That’s all they know, and it’s all they care to know.
@@luke_fabis Sure, most Americans won't know what to DO with celeriac, but they will recognize it as part of a plant. Broccoli/cauliflower/artichokes look weird to some people because they're a part of a plant you'll never see unless you're actively paying attention to nature. Unopened flowers aren't colorful and attention grabbing enough to be noticed without actually looking. I imagine that the person in who said broccoli looked like it was from another planet had never done any gardening and only ever paid attention to flowers once they had opened. If I didn't know that broccoli was a collection of unopened flowers/had never seen, say, hydrangeas before their flowers open I'd think it was a pretty strange plant too. Is it sad that we don't stop to pay attention to the world around us? Yes, but blaming people for what they don't know isn't going to help anyone.
@@melanieniemann4160 I really don’t follow what you’re saying here. Broccoli is much more recognizable as a plant than celeriac. For starters, it’s green and has leaves.
I don’t blame people for being ignorant, but I absolutely blame them if they lack the curiosity and intellectual honesty to fill in their gaps.
@@luke_fabis Are you the food police?
I love adding wild green onions to potato salad. Such a perfect addition! We have these growing all arround in my village in Bulgaria.
8:02..... ahhhhh Emril. He's such a great guy from what I've heard. Real down to earth too. I miss watching his shows, not that I even own a TV anymore anyways.
I always remember seeing both wild onions and "wild strawberries" growing in my backyard. My grandpa always warned me they were toxic, but it turns out many of these things are not toxic and exactly what you would think they are... wild versions of the domesticated produce we eat today!
I assume you are talking about the false strawberry (Potentilla indica). Completely flavorless to me, but completely edible. For some reason kids seem to love it, though. I think it is the novelty of strawberries growing in the yard.
He didn’t want you to die.
@@rogervanaman6739 Wild strawberries (the fragarias) and false strawberries (potentillas) are different things - strawberries are bred from the collection of various wild strawberry plants that are native across the entirety of the northern hemisphere. Actual wild strawberry is as a general rule quite delicious, but they are small and take forever to pick in comparison to strawberries.
But they are either native or naturalised pretty much everywhere the legates live, so they might very well actually be talking about wild strawberry.
I get the feeling parents say this because they're too lazy to identify plants properly and just lie to their kids that they're poison, lol
My parents didn't do that, thankfully
@@catpoke9557 This is exactly it.
One of my memories from early childhood was going out with my family, grandparents, and aunt/uncle/cousins and gather a bunch of wild onions. Then going back to my grandparents house and my grandmother would make wild onion dumplings in chicken stock and oyster soup.
That first clip with you eating the garlic grass really gives a new meaning to "me with a goatee".
Long live the empire
Long live the empire
Long live the empire
Long live the empire
Long live the empire
I remember discovering "grass that smelled like onions" when I was in 1st grade. It was early spring and we were at recess, sitting on the ground, playing under a catalpa tree (before I knew the name of those, either). I was running my fingers through the nice green "grass" and it smelled like onions! I've chewed on them occasionally but never picked any to use while cooking!
Good thing you didn't in the school yard. Probably sprayed with chemicals.
Last summer, I bought and planted two pots of a plant from a farmer's market that look just like that.
They called it 'Garlic Chives', but I'm not certain exactly what it is - sounds a lot like what you're describing.
Tastes like garlic plus 'green', and is more fibrous than store-bought chives.
They grew great all summer, and I'd usually grab a handful every time I went outside.
I'm from North Dakota, so maybe that's just the regional slang for it up here.
Anyways, love your content! Keep 'em coming.
Garlic chives are Allium tuberosum aka A.chinense. They are native to eastern Asia and do very well here in southern Ontario. They can invade your lawn if you don't clip off the seed heads before they mature seed, and they also spread out as a clump. They have pretty white flowers in late summer. I think they might be winter hardy in your area too. Enjoy!
Garlic chives are great for cooking! Treat them like any fresh herb.
I know those! It's called 韭菜 in chinese and is commonly used in chinese cooking, we add them in dumpling and bun fillings and they are delicious!
@@b.a.erlebacher1139 I got garlic chives last year and thank heavens I decided to keep them as houseplants instead of planting them in the yard. Invasive species are super unwelcome around where I live. Thanks for the info!
@@b.a.erlebacher1139 I've got some plants that were also called "garlic chives" but these ones have light-purple flowers. They're flowering right now (southern hemisphere summer).
Only Adam would be able to smoothly transition eating wild herbs into a life insurance sponsor
I used to love going out and plucking up wild onions and just munching on them after a quick rinse. These days I love the garlicky smell after mowing my lawn. I also always collect the seeds when they finally do go to seed and spread them around my yard and garden beds.
Unfortunately my luck that the semi abandoned wetland near me, which I thought was full of ramps, turns out to all be the poisonous lookalikes. Thankfully I learned the easy way and not the hard way.
My mother told me they were poisonous growing up, very happy to learn that they're edible, free, and delicious!
Maybe you were in an area with death Camas?
I love that you moved to Tennessee. When you do these videos it helps me figure out things that I've been trying to figure out in my yard
In Germany (especially in the center of the country) at around this time of the year in some forests there's an explosion of "Bärlauch" (lit. Bear garlic, colloquially known in English as wild garlic). It's amazing, you walk in the forest and suddenly the air smells strongly of onion. People make pesto out of the leaves, and it's delicious. One stroll in the forest can yield a week's worth of pesto material. And just like you said, some poisonous plants can be mistaken for Bärlauch, mainly "Maiglöckschen" (aka Lilly of the valley).
It's great in dumplings as well 😋
Love that smell, I harvest it in Scotland too. Going to try that idea of making pesto! what sort of nut do you use?
@@lemagreengreen I always use pine seeds
It's in Swiss forests too! They're different than the onion grass, they have big flat leaves instead, but are just as yummy! It's very cool to see whole groves of the stuff dozens of meters across just off of the path. Makes the whole air smell of garlic, very nice.
Every time I get into a particular subject and go to learn more about it, you make a video doing a great job covering it. I literally picked some wild garlic today and wondered more about it and I get home from the kitchen to see this wonderful video ! Thank you for your knowledge and insight into the culinary world!
In Germany, they're called "Schnittlauch" which translates to "Cut Leek" suggesting it shares some ancestry with leek. You can even buy them in seed packets here and plant them in your garden but I've never seen so much of it grow in the wild like in your video.
Never mind I just googled wtf allium means...
schnittlauch = chives (the kind you can buy in a store)
but you can find Bärlauch (translates to " Bear Leek") which is pretty much wild garlic and it is growling like crazy in a lot of German Forests
@@dionn6909 early spring ptsd from everything having bärlauch in it. It‘s really tasty but damn do you taste it and smell like it (sweat) for quite some time
@@dionn6909 bärlauch is ramslök in Swedish. Absolutely love it but almost every dish has it during those spring weeks they are fresh. Might be a good thing it is a few weeks per year we can have them.
@@dionn6909 A better translation for _Bärlauch_ is _Bear Garlic,_ especially when Garlic is called _Knoblauch_ (knob "leek"). The German word _Lauch_ is just a lot more versatile than the English equivalent.
You are talking about an invasive European weed called Allium vineale L., it is bad for the USA.
I actually tried to grow a local wild onion variety (probably allium Carmeli) at home and I have to say that it's completely worth it.
These plants are much more resilient than cultivated varieties so just natural watering from the rain and poor soil is enough to produce long and strong leaves (around 30 cm each), and they also are more pungent than store stuff, although not as strong as some other varieties that I haven't managed to get my hands on yet like allium Neapolitans.
I never thought about using the bulbs, but now I'm probably going to try to do that with the older plants, especially considering that they are very easy to breed, each plant taking around 2 seasons to reach maturity from a seed.
In short, it's a worthwhile project at least as some sort of gardening practice, that also has a direct reward in a form of literal loads of vitamins and all this good stuff.
For better results it's also possible to grow those together with legumes, this way the onions will protect legumes from pests and legumes will aerate and enrich the soil with nitrates and organics, something that will be hard to do otherwise, at least without disrupting the plants - bulbs stay in the ground for a couple of seasons.
Edit: if you ask why I even thought about that - I'm too lazy to go two floors to the garden in wadi to actually collect the wild stuff
Flat blade => generally closer to a garlic
Tube blade => generally closer to an onion
Some flat leaves can taste oniony & some tube leaves can taste garlicky. Alliums that don't smell are usually poisonous, & some that do smell slightly may also be mildly toxic
The city of Chicago was named by Algonquin natives "skunk" because of it's huge onion fields. Wild alliums remain a precious commodity for natives of many nations even today
When I was little, I had great memories of the extremely dense woods behind my childhood home. Almost like a painting, there was a small clearing maybe two meters in diameter, where the sun shone through the trees, and wild onions grew so strong that you could smell them far away, and made a shaggy carpet of green. Unfortunately as I got older, poison ivy grew rampant through the whole woods and took over that clearing as well, but I still remember what it looked & smelled like.
Video idea that you can totally take Adam, the difference between dark and white meat, why they taste different, why they need different cooking times, either debunking or reinforcing the notion that white meat is healthier and should be used in everything, and how that is effecting chickens and the chicken industry as a whole, and the benefits/drawbacks of replacing chicken breast with chicken thighs in recipes, which is something I've been doing for months and love it
In Scandinavia, the bulb of a flower is actually called the same as an onion. So if you for instance wanted to plant tulips, you'd buy tulip-onions to plant :)
Danish: Tulipanløg
Norwegian: Tulipanløk
Swedish: Tulpanlök
Hungarian too (hagyma = bulb, onion)
In Polish, and i would assume also other Slavic languages its the same. All bulbs are called cebula - onions
Tulip bulb - cebula tulipana
The same goes for German with "Zwiebel"
Same with Baltic languages!
We have more in common than what divides us.
I love how he does the ad live next to the road, makes it sound relaxing and less sellout-y and out of place
Yeah I hate those pre recorded ads added in videos that makes it feel like a commercial rather than Adam just talking to his viewers.
Where I live there's plenty of wild alliums all year round. In spring there's wild garlic in the forests, in summer, my chives come up, in autumn this allium I don't know the name of comes up near rocky coastal cliff areas, there's so many tasty alliums!
Paresthesia is pronounced like anesthesia, they both come from the same Greek root of “aisthesia” meaning feeling or sensation and then modified with a prefix (“a-“ meaning a lack of or “para” meaning abnormal). Paresthesias (plural) means that there were several distinct areas of the body that felt tingly instead of just one area or it being the entire body as a whole.
If you don't already have them in your garden there are some easy alliums you can introduce. Chives (A.schoenprasum) has purple flowers in late spring. Garlic chives (A.tuberosum aka A.chinense) will invade your lawn quite successfully and has white flowers in late summer. Don't let it set seed if you don't want it in your lawn. If you grow hardneck garlic and let the scaphe mature, it will make a clump of tiny bulbils at the top of the scaphe. Plant these (just sprinkle them on the ground and rake them in) and you'll have lots of green garlic in the spring, small single clove garlic in late summer, and full size bulbs the next year. As Adam mentioned, topsetting onions (A. x proliferum) look wonderfully weird and will keep you in green onions for life with almost no effort. I'm in southern Ontario, and these things work for me.
I didn't realize anybody didn't know this. I just thought that was part of childhood, your mom or dad explained there were onions in the yard, showed you how to pull em out, and for about a week you were super thrilled with the idea of helping make dinner.... And your parents got you to do some weeding without it sounding like real work.
I have some of these in my yard too!! I showed my dad when we were outside and he was stunned that they were edible
when i was in preschool we had show and tell. at my house we had just moved to another house and one of the things that we got when we moved (less than a block away) was wild garlic. so that was my show and tell in preschool. i have loved it ever since.
I enjoyed this video, topic, and even the ad. The ad read blindsided me in the most entertaining way haha. Even considering how smooth they tend to be around here, that was very impressive. Good work Adam
Ooh I remember when I was a kid, I was pulling random weeds during recess, and being super excited when I found those ‘onions’.
Some other kids joined me and we would show our teachers the handfuls of onions we picked. They did not appreciate the oniony smell in their classrooms, but I think they were glad we were having fun.
The ones around me are the Nodding onion and they are small like the one you dug up and are sweet like a red onion but sharper like a shallot.
Also, there is a wild meadow near me that was cultivated by the native americans where they weeded out the death camas and encouraged the edible camas and strawberries to grow. Every year the purple camas bloom giving quite the show.
My dad and I used to pull these up at our old vacation home on Lake Hartwell in SC. Big handful of the green sprigs on our sandwiches for lunch, tasty stuff. Thanks for bringing back memories with another great video
these are not so common in the UK! but we do have something we call wild garlic, or ramsons, which is a broad leaf allium - just starting to come up now. Wizz with oil and any sort of nut and you get the best garlic pesto!
I have a ton of wild garlic all over my apartment complex. I do have a chive plant but the wild garlics all stayed green through the winter while mine went dormant in its pot. Loved using them as free chives with baked potatoes.
Me: Gathering wild alliums sounds like fun
Adam: A man from Northern Arizona got wildly ill eating something he mistook for garlic
Me, living in Northern AZ: Guess I gotta be careful
Adam: Buy life insurance
Me: Maybe no wild allium for me...
You are talking about an invasive European weed called Allium vineale L.
If it smells like and looks like alliums, then it is alliums. It's really easy to identify. I think this dad just put it in his mouth without smelling and then swallowed.
My wife and I used wild onions to season fresh trout when camping at about 7,000’ in the Rockies. They were growing in high valleys in large numbers and were tougher than domestic varieties obviously, but a really neat and hardy plant to find and use in the wilderness and tasted great.
0:14 it's shots like these that keep me coming back to the Adam Ragusea channel 😂
I loved picking these as a kid! My grandma and I used to use them to flavor onion soups. She thought they were too strong but I adore them
Lol I remember growing up and playing on the playground during recess I would rip me up some onions from the ground and just start munchin’ 😂 I felt like I discovered the elusive “wild onion” all on my own
In Korea, wild aliums called dallae are used in herbal dish called namul. Dallae-muchim or -kimchi pairs well with meat recipes as side dishes.
Me and best friend would often play with this during recess in elementary school. I have distinct memories of bringing home a bird nest we made of onion grass.
I like that you're going this direction. There's lots of good stuff out there.
I find it really funny reading everyone's story of finding "grass that smells like onion". I've never had anything similar. Guess the tropical climate here isn't very suitable for them :(
@Adam Ragusea , it's common, older wisdom like this that keeps me coming back. Now, if only I could find and spread "ramps" in my yard and garden. My whole life, I've heard of these Native American Alliums, and haven't ever tasted one.
My old man and his family had a dairy cow at home. She got into a pen which my grandad hadn’t cleared of alliums. Really ruined their breakfast and tea the next morning lol
We live on 6 acres and have arugula, onion, garlic, clover, blackberries and now sage growing. I thank the deer for help spreading them, too.
"Mom the weird man is eating our lawn again"
"Stop calling your father 'the weird man'"
@@NathanTAK "I will if he stops eating the lawn"
@@ManOfTheWeek596 Wait what the actual fuck is your profile picture
After substituting wild onions for chives in a dish which got rave reviews at a church potluck years ago, I've often cooked with yard onions when they're sprouting in late winter and spring in northeast Mississippi.
I remember when I was younger finding those little onions, and I ate them some times, once I found one that looked more orange and not white and tried it and it made my mouth numb it was so bitter so I spit it out, good to know what that was now
That ad plug was so smooth I am genuinely impressed and not even mad
In Germany we eat a lot of Chives (called Schnittlauch here). It's pretty similar if not the same, right? It grows everywhere over here and I like to snack it when on a walk in the forest :D
Thanks for this video, Adam. One thing I like about invasives is that you can basically harvest with abandon. In contrast, native ramps can take seven years to reach maturity, so when foraging for those, it's a good idea to snip the greens and leave the bulbs!
*Wild* onions make me cry even more now...
The bulbs are great to freeze and they act as both a Garlic & Onion when making broths for soups
Adam: **talks about poisonous look-alikes tasting bitter**
Also Adam: "Man these bitter yard onions are delicious!"
This is why I love Ragusea’s videos.Those chive-like plants are exactly what is growing in my mother in law’s yard. Been curious about them for years.
I've been using yard chives in my cooking for years. They're especially great on pizza!
I'm in the coastal zone in Northern California. I have two main patches of wild Allium. The blades are much like a spring onion, but are triangular in cross section, and a bit more fibrous. They are also about to flower (March 7th). The white flowers are incredible added to a fresh salad or anywhere a touch of onion/garlic would be good fresh. I've even sauteed them with butter for an incredible shrimp or octopus scampi.
My next foraging adventure will be nettles. So happy for Spring!
Last time I was this early Adam still bought brown sugar.
I enjoy the Allium vineale in so many ways. Of course the green "chives" are great fresh, but I freeze a lot and dry some, too, after cutting them into small bits, to use all year. I look for the scapes (the flower stalks that shoot up from the individual bulbs) to sautee later in the spring. It does take practice to see them in tall grass of unmowed areas, which is where they will be (mowing will keep them from putting up the scapes). If you miss the scapes, on the A. vineale, there aren't flowers, but little bulblets. Those are great in potatoes, and there sure can be a lot of them. Let them dry and they keep a long time. And the larger underground bulbs are really great in honey. I just clean the bulbs and put them in honey, so it's super easy to do. They get sweet and the honey gets a garlic flavor that is great on wild greens. The bulbs are great in a cream sauce, too, so good. It's nice to use the whole plant (chopped up) in soups, too. Allium vineale is so abundant and so under appreciated. And we can harvest as much as we want because they are considered invasive. Even for people that don't have a good sense of smell, an dinstinctive way to ID the A. vineale is to look for the little ridges on the round hollow stems. Happy foraging!
I don't know much about plants, but I know that around where I live there's lots of people that go pick wild onions/garlic or something similar to that. They sometimes confuse them with lily of the valley (before they started blooming) and get sick, because those are toxic (I think). Some recipes that I've seen require large amounts and if one or two are not wild onions they don't notice it that much.
I don't know how much is dangerous, but I've been foraging bear garlic for a couple of years and I'm pretty confident that if you pick the best leaves there's no chance of mistakes, the problem is people clearing a small area assuming all the plants are the same. Well worth investigating your local patch, but also well worth looking at lily of the valley, it's quite easy to tell the difference even for novices
@@Bullsquid592 thanks for the info :). I don't go foraging, it's something my mom told me. I'm a very careful person so I tend to fret too much if I would.
@@Bullsquid592 Yes, lucky you, bear garlic (Allium ursinum) or 'ramps' are a super delicacy. They are easy to distinguish because, of course, they smell like garlic. Like any plant or mushroom we forage, it's important to inspect each one to be sure we haven't picked up a lookalike or an intruder. There are so many delicious 'weeds' out there to enjoy, and most people just pull them up and throw them away.
Everyone should learn a few basic plants, though, so you can enjoy them without worrying. Dandelions and nettles are easy, then lamb's quarters, chickweed, garlic mustard, plantain, sorrel, hairy bittercress...delicious!
Yes, Lily of the Valley are poisonous. If you have the garlic and Lily of the Valley growing together, its too easy to get a Lily of the Valley leaf mixed in, so its too dangerous to forage there.
@@chezmoi42 Mesquite beans are really good and easy to identify. Tastes sort of like cinnamon, citrus, and a tiny bit of honey to me.
Discovered this last a few summers ago with my boyfriend. We were hanging out and gardening in his yard and I was picking some of the grass that had grown in the garden bed so it wouldn't steal nutrients from the flowers. It smelled like onions, so I googled it to see if it was safe and I tried some. It was delicious and it turns out it's invasive in my area, so I've been adding some to my cooking ever since!
I'm extremely sensitive to bitter flavors, yet wild onion like this never bothers me. It tastes sweet and punchy, just like the domesticated variety. Another way to make them, which a wilderness channel mentioned, was roasting over a campfire. If you find these and manage to get a squirrel or rabbit, you've got a nice feast waiting back at camp.
I believe I have what they call "'super taster" tastebuds. I can't stand any alcoholic tannins like beer and wine, or coffee/tea without plenty of sugar. Chocolate that isn't milk chocolate, even ones at only 30% cacao is too bitter. A lot of vegetables are too bitter, like celery, spinach, and asparagus. Carrots are extremely difficult to find edible because most taste like bitter dirt (but when I get a good one, oh boy is it a treat). On the other side, fructose is extremely powerful on my tongue, too. Any fruit is too sweet for me to stomach more than a single bite, combined with the bitterness that comes from the tannins to make for a really annoying flavor.
Beets must be an extreme "no" for you since they always seem to have a distinct "dirt" element to their flavor.
Maybe you have extra tongue in that tongue haha
@@annbrookens945 Yeah, they've gotten really bad as I got older. I could get away with one or two slices of the candied ones we make at get togethers when I was 8, but now they're just bleh.
There are certain compounds only some people find bitter due to genetics. I suspect that what makes wild onion bitter is one such compound, and you simply can't taste it.
I also don't find it bitter, and I find broccoli sweet, which is something that contains a compound some people find extremely bitter and others don't taste at all or very little.
the smell of these always reminds me of summer back home :) this video makes me miss it!
I love when brand integrations are seamless, like promoting foraging and life insurance
Our thoughts exactly
When I was little it was my job to collect these from the yard! We had an organic garden and my dad loved to cook these and hated smelling like onions after mowing so it was a win-win! I got a nickel for every bulb I pulled up and I collected hundreds at a time!
Wait, you can season the cows(with wild onions and garlic) rather than season the steak?
In Dingle, Ireland they purportedly graze lambs on grass near the sea that gives the meat an already salted flavor. So… Why I Season my chop’s food, not my chop. Although, that would miss out on H E T E R O G E N E I T Y.
No. You cannot. He's obviously never had beef from a cow that was grazing on wild onions. Commercial farms go to great length to keep those things out of their fields. (We'd just keep any cow destined for the dinner table in the barn on grains for a week or two.)
@@jfbeam "no you can't"
"why? because we don't do it. i bet you've never even tried it"
@@ausore9832 Come to my farm. I'll give you a cow that's been grazing on wild onions. You will barf trying to eat that meat! If put in a barn to carefully meter what it eats, it's remotely possible to strike a balance, but that's an insanely expensive experiment. (that's the point of putting the cow to be eaten in the barn in the first place...)
@@jfbeam ah, you didn't make that apparent at first
A few years ago, I found a large patch of wild garlic next to a road so I ripped a bunch out of the ground and transferred it to my garden. Once separated, the wild garlic does form multi cloved bulbs which are small and quite pungent. Wild garlic that has bolted will have little bulblets post flowering and have a similar pungency to the cloves. But the flowers, before they form bulblets, have a very pleasant sweet garlic taste that works amazingly well as a garnish.
This is half my yard..the local rabbits love to eat em.. good video
Those rabbits must be well seasoned
Foraging is both a skill and an artform. The artform comes from just being familiar with all the unique ways a single species can manifest, and the skill comes from knowing IF ITS BITTER DONT KEEP EATING IT.
0:14 Adam Ragoatsea
Banger
Your transitions into your sponsered segments are always so good. For most TH-camrs, I can tell when they are going to start their sponsored segments. I never realize you've started your's until you say the name of the company, or you say, "This video is sponsored by..."
6:32 the real flavoring the cow not the meat
During the initial pandemic lockdown in April/May a former roommate and I had plenty of cans and dry goods stockpiled but had a lack of spices and were too afraid to go to the store in our city. Through research and some daring experimentation we figured out that the ones in our yard were edible. Wish I had just found this video, Thank you for bringing back that memory 💖
I'm deathly allergic to garlic but not onions so I'm curious, would this kill me?
Don’t quote me on this but it’s probably a common ancestor of both so, probably don’t try it, especially if it’s a deathly allergy
@@theslamjamfrincisco2820 I'm not about to go search it out and shove it in my mouth because science. It would just be nice to know whether it's an options for sudoku if I get desperate
@@outside8312 I mean that’s whow the cavemen did it, embrace tradition and shove grass and various seeds in your mouth.
@@outside8312 why not just use regular garlic for sudoku
This explains why years ago when I tasted them I was confused wondering whether they were onions or garlic.
I'm too cowardly to trust my identifications of any plants even in my garden. I think I have plenty of well established wild garlic. But will not be testing my surety any time soon. (We're also fighting knotweed in this garden with strong weedkillers)
Then definitely don’t try it if you’re treating your lawn lol
The main trick is the smell, the garlicky oniony smell only comes from the allium family. There are several allium lookalikes depending which species you are looking for and there are good guides out there on what to be careful of but as Adam says, evolution works, if it tastes bad don't swallow it, there are very few plants poisonous enough to hurt from a taste but if it tastes like onion it's an onion. (Nothing else makes that oniony chemical)
I've been eating wild onions out of people's flowerbeds for years now. Don't think if found a poisonous look alike yet. Come to think of it though I probably wouldn't think it really looks alike.
I also have to fight my paranoid side when trying a new wild plant, but I'm making an effort and starting small. If I see a plant I recognize, I eat a small amount. Just what-ever I'm comfortable with. Once you've had it several times and know it doesn't hurt you, and what it's supposed to taste and smell like, it's not scary anymore. As @Ben M says; very few plants are poisonous enough that a small taste is dangerous. And I'll add: Even grocery store veges contain _tiny_ amounts of poisonous compounds, as herbivores/omnivores, our livers are designed to just deal with them. "Poisonous", is not an all-or-nothing state. It's a continuum.
Spring ramps are a delicacy in Ohio and Midwest region.
As you said, it is important to differentiate between similar look-a-likes that grow in the same habitat, like lily-of-the-valley.
The ramps have one or two leaves that have individual stems and LotV have multiple leaves that whorl around a single stem leading to flowers. Ramps don't flower until much later in the season. The strong onion smell is another telling ramp characteristic, as LotV don't smell.
It's wild out there...
Great video, Adam.
Been doing this since middle school.
@@blackstar9481 Don't pretend like you haven't eaten grass
OG grass eater
@@Theeswaglord it keeps it away from my goats, chickens, and cattle, while flavoring my food. I see nothing to be ashamed about.
My fiance and I discovered garlic scrapes at our local farmers market last year. Pan frying them with some butter and oil and boy! Honestly our new favorite seasonal vegetable.
The main thing I learned from this video is how closely related garlic and onion are.
...and tulips!
I started out watching your cooking videos and finding them very different and normal(its hard to explain). As I watched through the weeks I noticed that I would be watching videos that weren't about cooking(making a recipe) and enjoying them as well. it might be your tone or something but I just can't stop watching them.