Tastebuds go wild and free

These lesser alliums are a tasty alternative.

"Wild thing, you make my heart sing ...", especially when the wild thing is a wild onion enhancing my food without costing anything at all.

You will have seen wild onions in wild(ish) places all around Otago. They like damp places under trees, in parks, in the margins of the bush and on the edges of cemeteries. You may even have them in the bottom of your garden. They are very weedy, spread a lot and are hard to get rid of. I accidentally introduced them to our garden with a some leaf mulch I had gathered from under trees at the local cemetery, but luckily I ate them all before they got a chance to establish and spread.

Also known as three-cornered leeks or allium triquetrum these wild onions are introduced from Europe. I remember reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles at high school and Tess and the other dairy maids spend a day walking and crawling across the paddocks looking for wild onion and garlic plants that had been tainting the flavour of the milk, so they could be removed. So don’t let them loose on your dairy farm either.

If you are buying spring onions at the moment they cost about $4 a bunch, so consider keeping an eye out for the wild alternative while you are out walking, but also make sure you are collecting from an area where they won’t have been sprayed.

It is pretty easy to identify wild onions. They have long green strap-like leaves with a fold in the strap that gives them three corners. The flowers are very distinctive and look quite a lot like snow drops. They have pretty little white flowers with a thin green line down each petal. They always have a strong onion smell.

The growing season is from autumn until late spring when their little bulbs swell and the aerial parts die off over summer. This is handy as it is also when bought spring onions are at their most expensive.

The white bulbs make delicately flavoured pretty little white cocktail pickled onions. Use white vinegar to preserve their colour. You need to be a pretty dedicated forager to do this as they are very small and fiddly to prepare.

I experimented with making a dip by blending walnuts, wild onions, olive oil, lemon juice and salt. It turned out like a sort of wild green pesto and was really nice on crackers; this was my favourite way to serve them.

Another tasty use is to pick plenty of the little white flower heads, dip them in chickpea batter (chickpea flour, water and seasonings mixed and left for half an hour), then fry in oil to make an oniony fritter.

A really easy use though is to chop the leaves into salads to replace bought spring onions. They have a delicate onion flavour raw, which is not so strong when cooked, so add them at the last minute to a soup or casserole to add colour and a burst of fresh flavour.

Wild onions are probably not going to replace regular onion varieties any time soon, but it is handy to know you can eat them, and if you have them in your garden already, and want them gone, you can always eat your way through the problem.