Garlic scape season is short, so savor it

Before the bulbs mature, the flimsy flower stalks of hardneck garlic are tender and fragrant – and ready for use in pretty much any recipe that calls for chives, green onions or a few cloves of garlic.

Harvested early to help the bulbs grow bigger, these tangled treasures of the farmers market or your CSA box are good raw or cooked. But they’re best just before their thin stems begin to curl. The twispy wisps become tougher – and more spirally, spicy and fibrous – as they mature.

Still, their flavor is a bit mellower than the bulb at their base. They carry the pungent flavor of garlic without the bite.

Robin Cherry, author of “Garlic: An Edible Biography,” recommends harvesting garlic scapes when their stalks are about 10 inches long.

“This will redirect the energy from the scape to the bulb,” Cherry wrote. “If scapes are allowed to keep growing, they will reduce the size of the bulb, sometimes by as much as 50 percent.”

Early in garlic scape season, they can be chopped like chives or green onions and added to salads or processed with white beans or chickpeas – or a combination of both – to add flavor to hummus. Chopped scapes also bring a bit more zing to homemade ranch or blue cheese dressings or dips – or your favorite gazpacho recipe.

Sauté them lightly later in the season and add them to pasta, risotto or orzo dishes – along with some freshly foraged morels and Parmesan shavings. Throw them in with other cooked greens – collard, kale, mustard, chard – or egg dishes such as omelets, frittatas, quiches or stratas.

Bake them into cheddar biscuits. Put them in spring rolls or on top of pizza. Pickle them. Add them into soups such as creamy potato, cauliflower, or pea and spinach, or use them on top of soups as a garnish.

Whatever you do, savor their flavor. Garlic scape season is very short. To capture the fleeting taste of late spring, make garlic scape pesto and freeze a little for a punchy pick-me-up during the darkest days of next winter.

Garlic Scape Pesto

From “Garlic: An Edible Biography” by Robin Cherry

1 pound garlic scapes, chopped

3/4 cup grated Pecorino Romano

1 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more to store

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes (optional)

Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Place the scapes and cheese in a food processor and pulse to coarsely grind the ingredients. With the food processor running, pour the olive oil through the feed tube in a thin stream. Continue to puree the pesto just until smooth and light but still has some texture. Transfer the pesto to a bowl and stir in the lemon juice, red pepper flakes, if using, and black pepper.

Note: For added flavor and texture, add 1 cup toasted pine nuts or walnuts and coarse salt to taste. To store, place pesto in a container, top it with a layer of oil, cover it tightly and keep it in the refrigerator up to 2 days. For longer storage, freeze small containers of pesto up to 2 months (or longer).

Yield: 2 cups