Garlic mustard is an incredible, and invasive, wild edible that I’ve really come to love. It’s one of the first plants to pop up in the spring, thriving alongside trails and other disturbed areas. I’ve seen it growing in full sun and dappled shade, in all kinds of environments. Originally native to Europe, this weed was probably brought over as a food plant, and has spread itself across the continent. It is a tenacious little plant that can outcompete just about anything it grows alongside, which has made it an unwelcome guest in our wild places. 

Generally, restraint is an important aspect of practicing responsible foraging, but with the garlic mustard, that principle flies out the window. It’s fine to get a little “henhouse syndrome” with garlic mustard- even if you do somehow manage to eradicate your local population, you’re doing a good thing for the environment. Many of my wild edibles are picked by the careful handful and then mixed into a saute of other greens, because I can’t possibly gather enough of them to do anything else. Not so with the garlic mustard. It is absolutely EVERYWHERE, and you can find and responsibly take enough to experiment with batches of all kinds of things. I’ve made some fantastic batches of kimchi with cabbage and plenty of garlic mustard. I also love it in a pesto or other pureed sauce.

 It’s described as having a pungent, garlic-y flavor that some people find unpleasant, but I have found it to be a really excellent food green. I usually forage it in the spring, while it’s young and still tender. At this stage, the plant forms a bushy basal rosette of heart-shaped leaves that are tender and easy to harvest by cutting the whole plant just above the soil. After a few weeks, the plant begins to bolt and send up tall, flower bearing stalks. The leaves on these stalks are smaller and more pointed, and they are harder to harvest because of how small and sparsely spaced they are. 

I love this pesto because it’s a beautiful way to preserve some of the flavors of early spring for months to come. We picked the garlic mustard on a walk along the river before we went shad fishing, and the pesto turned out to be the perfect accompaniment to the fried shad roe we had afterward. It’s also been great on pasta, or thinned with a little more olive oil and used as a bread dip. Our friends gifted us some fresh pecans from the trees on their farm, so we used them here in place of the more traditional pine nuts. Feel free to substitute whatever you have in your pantry.

Garlic Mustard & Pecan Pesto

Prep Time: 10 minutes

All the ingredient measurements here are approximate- feel free to tweak as needed to suit your taste. In particular, mustard garlic wilts very quickly after you pick it, so the 3 cup measurement below is approximate. You may want to use more or less depending on the freshness of your greens.

Ingredients:

3 cups garlic mustard leaves

1 cup toasted pecans

2 lemons, zest of

2 lemon, juice of

3 garlic cloves

2 tbsp parmesan, grated

1 cup evoo

Salt

In a blender, pulse the pecans to break them up. Add the garlic cloves, parmesan, lemon zest and juice. Pulse again. Add in the garlic mustard leaves and blend on low to medium setting. Slowly add in olive oil, stopping and scraping down the sides of the blender periodically to get everything incorporated. Season with salt to taste.