Our bounty of ramps from Saratoga Wild Roots. We will be doing a lot of cooking with ramps.
Ramps season has arrived in upstate New York, and we’re fortunate to have a generous supply from our friends at Saratoga Wild Roots. Some will go into the ground in hopes of a future harvest, and then we’lll do a lot of cooking with ramps.
We’ll start with instant gratification: grilled ramps, prepared simply and served with a nice steak. We’ll make a pound of ramps compound butter so we can enjoy the taste of these delicate alliums all year long. Between these bookends we’ll certainly use the leaves to make ramps risotto and the bulbs for pickled ramps. And hopefully there will be some left over for further experimentation.
Try our recipe for Pickled Ramps Bulbs.
On, and we’ll definitely make some ramps biscuits, using either this recipe from Justine Doiron or this one from D’Artagnan, the Hudson Valley purveyor of game and foie gras. I just missed a ramps biscuit last weekend when the last was purchased by the customer in front of me at the exquisite Bakery Suzanne, so I will go earlier this time, and use their product as my baking guide.
For more ideas about cooking with ramps, do a search on BMF and you’ll find this post and this one where we go ramps hunting with country ham master Allan Benton.
P.S. A note about storing ramps before use: they tell you to clean the plant under running water to remove dirt, but with so many I used two buckets for mass cleaning. This caused bruising in many of the leaves, which is not a disaster since they are going quickly into risotto or pesto. But next time I’d just store the ramps dirt and all in a cloth (ventilated) bag; they are after all living plants,
