What to Do With Garlic Scapes?

This summer my boyfriend and I signed up for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share. We invested a few hundred dollars in a local farm and, in return, every Wednesday for twenty-one weeks we get a lovely box of locally grown produce.

We spent a few weeks researching different farms and CSA programs and in the end we settled on Local Roots Farm. I already had a fondness for Local Roots' arugula and had heard a few local chefs sing the praises of their other vegetables. I also like that the farmers, Siri and Jason, live in the same Seattle neighborhood that we do. But what cemented it all was when, as a writer, I fell hard for this thoughtful post on food safety, industrial agriculture, and small farming on the Local Roots blog.

Supporting the local food system aside, there's another reason we love our CSA: It's fun. Every week is a surprise, with a new assortment of vegetables, all of which need to get cooked, showing up at our house. The unexpected variety of produce demands that we be more creative and flexible in the kitchen, and we also get to discover new-to-us vegetables, some of which quickly become favorites. Like garlic scapes.

Garlic scapes are pretty striking to behold: dense, ultra-green stalks that curl and coil to a pointed tip. I like to picture them as the tails of some sort of veggie-loving, mischievous green devil. Scapes, also called garlic tops, are the shoots that grow above-ground while the cloves grow underneath. Trimming the scapes is a win-win situation: it helps the bulbs below develop better and you get to eat them. Taking a bite out of a raw garlic scape will certainly wake you up: the flavor is so intense that it tastes downright spicy, yet scapes don't have the same garlicky harshness that will kill your palate the way raw garlic cloves do.

While rooting through cookbooks and nosing around online, trying to figure out what exactly a garlic scape is and what to do with it, I discovered local food writer Kim O'Donnel's inspirational ode to garlic scapes. I decided to whip up my own batch of garlic scape pesto, using just one bunch of scapes (cut into small pieces), a cup of olive oil, and one cup of grated Parmesan cheese (you could use more or less, depending on how cheesy you want it) whirled together in the food processor. The pesto makes for an addictive (and very pretty) sauce: we had it that night over farro and as a dip for roasted vegetables, then again the next night spread on toast. It would, of course, also be great on pasta.

One final note: We got the garlic scapes in our CSA box a few weeks ago, so we're probably the tail end of the short season. But I did just spy some scapes at the Columbia City Farmers Market this past Wednesday, so you may be able to score a bunch this week.