At the moment you can find an abundance of chickweed outside in nature! There is no part of the world where you can’t find chickweed so have a look around. It’s one of the first greens that starts growing in winter and one of the tenderest of wild greens. It’s available most of the year round, but can get stringy around midsummer. So go outside now to eat your weeds and make chickweed pakoras!
Chickweed is easy to distinguish from similar plants by a line of hairs that runs up the stem. If you have a close look you will see that the hairs appear on one side only, and then – when it reaches a pair of leaves – is continued on the opposite side. Can you see it in the picture?
Salad, pesto, smoothies…
Chickweed can be eaten raw. Most obvious is eating it as a salad. Or how about liquidised in a green smoothy? It makes a nice pesto as well. But the best recipe I’ve come across is chickweed pakoras by John Wright. I’ve made it often when I was still teaching groups in person and it was always a big hit.
Here’s the recipe
This recipe was inspired by the one from the book Hedgerow by John Wright – highly recommended if you would like to learn more about foraging and how use wild food to make delicious dishes..
Makes 8 – 10
(Don’t be too precise on quantities: it’s hard to get this one wrong…)
- 100 gr gram (chickpea) flour
- 1 tbsp medium curry powder or to taste
- ½ tps baking powder
- ½ tsp salt (or more)
- About 120 ml water
- 50 gr chickweed, washed, dried and roughly chopped
- 1 small onion
- 1 clove of garlic or a handful of wild garlic
- Vegetable oil for shallow frying
How to do it:
- Mix flour, curry powder, baking powder and salt
- Slowly stir in enough water to form a paste with the consistency of mustard
- Mix in chickweed, onion and garlic
- Heat a thin layer of oil in a heavy-based frying pan
- When hot, spoon in heaped spoonfuls of the pakora mixture to form little cakes. Space them well apart
- Cover with a lid and cook over a medium heat for about 5 minutes until crisp and golden brown on one side.
- Turn over the cakes and brown the other side
- Drain on kitchen paper and serve!
This recipe works well with different greens – wild or from the shop – too so it’s a great one to experiment!
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