Nettles, Ramps, & Other Woodland Wonders

“Nettles?!?” said my companion at dinner last night. “You’re cooking nettles? I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

Well, yes, I am cooking nettles, making a classic French soup, a potage velouté, warm, rich with butter and crème fraiche, delectable and healthy too with the nettles my foraging friend Petra gathered for me last week. I call it “classic” because it recalls all those creamy vegetable soups that used to be served in France (and perhaps still are), not in the grand restaurants but in cozy neighborhood bistros and at the tables of simple country cooks. It is such an easy technique, especially with modern kitchen equipment, like food processors but even more like immersion blenders, which have become so essential in my own kitchen in recent years—easy to use, easy to clean up, a quick way to make something delicious and even rather elegant for dinner all year long.

In fact, this is a technique, or a recipe, that can be applied to all kinds of seasonal vegetables—pumpkin or squash in autumn; leek and potato in winter (cream of mushroom too, delightful with dried porcini or cèpes); now, in mid-spring, wild foraged greens like nettles and ramps, as well as asparagus and the soon-to-arrive green garden peas or young spinach; in summertime, tomatoes will star in a soup that can be served warm or, in the dog days of August, refreshingly chilled. Not every vegetable is adaptable to a velouté—I find it hard to imagine green beans or eggplant pureed, but a velouté of bright yellow peppers recalls to me the passata di peperoni gialli, a puree of sweet yellow peppers, that the late great Fabio Picchi served at his Florence restaurant Cibrèo.

A foundation soup

Basically, you gently sauté or stew or sweat a bunch of aromatics (garlic, onion of some sort, carrot, maybe celery or parsley or my favorite herb lovage) in butter or olive oil or both, add some cubed potatoes to give the soup heft, and then, as the potatoes start to soften add liquid—chicken stock, vegetable stock, plain water. This is the foundation of any velouté to which you add the vegetable(s) of choice and when it is sufficiently cooked (the time varying obviously with spinach cooking quickly while peppers might take a bit longer), remove it from the heat, puree it, and add in something dairy—plain milk, heavy cream, crème fraiche, sour cream—returning it to the heat just to warm it thoroughly before serving. It's good to garnish the soup with something crisp—croutons that you make yourself from stale ends of bread, crisply fried slivers of onion or leek, lardons of bacon or pancetta, or bits of whatever vegetable is the base of the soup. A sprinkle of finely chopped fresh herbs, which could be parsley, chives, tarragon, mint, cilantro, chervil, depending on what’s available and what seems to work, then a decorative dollop of cream, and it’s ready to serve.

A further benefit: These creamy puréed soups freeze well, so when something like nettles are in season, make an extra batch to have on hand. A potage velouté makes a great quick lunch or supper, or serve it as a starter for a more substantial meal. Scroll down for the recipe, along with a few variations.

Urtica urens?

As for the nettles, foraged in spring from woods and abandoned fields, they are terrifically good for us, laden with all kinds of beneficial antioxidants, vitamins A and C among them, and a source of calcium and other minerals. Country folk used to consume them like dandelion greens, for their tonic effect after a winter of basic stodge, and herbalists still recommend them for their anti-inflammatory effects. If you’re suffering from hay fever (pollen allergies), you may find a daily cup of nettle tea will be a big help and bring relief.

Botanically, stinging nettles are Urtica dioica and they do indeed sting, with a painful burn and a blistering rash when your bare skin encounters them, as I’ve found out unhappily all too often in the Italian countryside where they are prolific. When we bought our property in Tuscany many years ago, the approach to the old stone cottage was a forest of mature nettles. Long sleeves and garden gloves were needed just to get to what served as the front door. And even after decades of cutting back and clearing, the nettles will spring to vigorous life again at the first opportunity.

Urtica dioica grows all over the world, as a native plant. In Maine, however, the nettles are a slightly different, nonetheless valuable variety that has much less sting. In fact, I can prepare them with my bare hands without any problems. I believe it’s what’s called Urtica urens, a European native that has long since spread along the east coast of North America.

Whether dioica or urens, however, the nettles must be cleaned before you can do much of anything with them. If you’re not sure of the variety, you must handle them with rubber gloves (otherwise, you won’t want to handle them at all, I can assure you). Rinse them thoroughly in many changes of water (I got up to six with my latest batch). Then nip off the tender tops and pull the leaves away and discard the thicker stems. Once the nettles are cleaned and destemmed, blanching and shocking the greens is advisable.

Nettle soup (potage velouté aux orties)

A classic French vegetable purée, rich and elegant with cream and butter, super healthy with all those vegetables. Master this recipe: It will take you half an hour to put it all in place, though longer to cook it. Then adapt it for whatever you find among the fresh offerings in your local market. Scroll down to the end for further suggestions.

This will make 6 to 8 servings.

• 6 to 8 ounces of cleaned nettle greens (about 6 packed cups, or half a plastic shopping bag, which, I’m assured, is the correct way to measure nettles)

• 1 medium carrot, cleaned and chopped

• 1 large shallot, or 1 leek, or 1 medium yellow onion, chopped

• 1 fat garlic clove, chopped

• 1 or 2 stalks of celery, the greener the better, chopped

• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter

• 2 russet potatoes, peeled and cubed

• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

• 2 or 3 cups of chicken or vegetable stock

• 3 sprigs fresh thyme

• 1 bay leaf

• ¼ cup of heavy cream, plus a little more to garnish the soup

• Chopped parsley, chives or other green herbs to garnish

To blanch and shock the greens, bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil. Have ready a large bowl of ice water. When the water in the pot boils, add all the prepared nettle greens and bring back to the boil quickly. Leave for just 10 to 15 seconds, then, using tongs, pull the nettles out of the boiling water and drop them into the ice water bath. Do not discard the blanching water. Once the greens are chilled down, drain them thoroughly.

Add the oil and butter to a soup kettle or a large heavy saucepan and set over medium low heat. While the butter is melting, chop together the carrots, shallots, garlic, and celery. Add the chopped vegetables to the fat in the saucepan along with a good pinch of salt and cook, stirring, until the vegetables have softened and give off a nice aroma. Don’t let the vegetables brown.

Stir in the potato cubes, mixing everything together. When the potatoes start to soften, add a couple of cups of the blanching liquid and bring to a simmer, turning the heat down to low if necessary.  You’ll need 6 or 7 cups of liquid in all and it could be the blanching liquid, or chicken or vegetable stock, or plain water, or a combination. I use about half blanching liquid and half chicken stock. When the liquid simmers, add the thyme and bay leaf and some pepper. Then stir in the blanched nettles. Cook covered, until the potatoes are very tender. Taste and adjust the seasoning, then let the soup cool just a little before pureeing with an immersion blender or a food processor or an old-fashioned vegetable mill.

Add about ¼ cup of heavy cream or sour cream to the puree and stir to mix well. Taste again for seasoning, then bring back to a gentle simmer before serving, garnishing each plate with chopped green herbs or a thread of cream or croutons or even bits of bacon or pancetta, sauteed to a crisp.

Variations:

ramp and potato soup, garnished with Spanish extra-virgin...

Instead of nettles, use freshly harvested ramps, blanching and shocking them just as you do with the nettles and otherwise following the directions.

Make an asparagus soup: Break off the tips of a pound of asparagus and set them aside. Discard the tough ends of the stalks and cut the tender parts in one to two-inch lengths, adding them with the potatoes. Use chicken or vegetable stock for the liquid, bringing it to a simmer separately. Poach the asparagus tips in the stock before adding the stock to the vegetables, then use the poached tips to garnish the pureed soup.

When fresh green (English) peas are in season, substitute about 2 cups of shelled peas for the nettles. Add them to the soup with the potatoes and use chicken or vegetable stock for the liquid.

Substitute two pounds of carefully rinsed spinach, adding it with the chicken or vegetable stock.

Ramps

I mentioned ramps above as a substitute for nettles in the potage velouté, but there are loads of other uses for ramps. Unlike nettles they’re easy to handle, but like nettles they may well require a number of rinses before they’re completely clean. Unlike nettles, too, ramps are as good raw as they are cooked. Sliver the leaves and add to a salad. I tossed them into a cabbage salad or slaw, made with hard-to-find Savoy cabbage, radishes, and little Hakurei turnips; the ramps added noticeable zip.

Similarly, a handful of slivered ramps are as good an addition to a spring vegetables minestrone or a risotto primavera as they are to scrambled eggs on toast for breakfast. Just stir the raw slivered ramps into the eggs before adding them to a buttery skillet.

Speaking of breakfast (my favorite meal of the day), here’s a great recipe for buttermilk biscuits embellished with more of those slivered ramps:

Buttermilk Ramp Biscuits

The biggest caution in making biscuits is not to overmix or overprocess. Obviously, all the ingredients should be combined but not to the extent of a smooth paste. Unmixed bits of butter help to make the biscuits flaky, always the most desirable outcome.

Another truc, as the French call their clever little kitchen secrets, is refrigeration—the butter should be frozen, not refrigerator chilled but actually firmly frozen, before grating. And refrigerating the dough for at least half an hour before baking is another astute trick to achieving that flakiness.

This will make a dozen biscuits:

• 2 cups of mixed all-purpose and whole wheat flour

• 1 tablespoon sugar

• 2 ½ teaspoons baking powder

• 1 teaspoon sea salt

• 1 stick frozen unsalted butter

• ½ cup buttermilk

• 1 whole egg

• 1 packed cup slivered fresh ramps

• 2 tablespoons heavy cream

You could use all ap flour but I prefer a mixture, roughly half and half, for added flavor and nutrition. Combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in the bowl of a food processor and pulse briefly just to mix.

Grate the frozen stick of butter on the large holes of a box grater and add the butter bits to the processor. Process in brief spurts to combine and make a mix that has the texture of coarse cornmeal.

Whisk the egg and buttermilk together, and, with the machine running, pour the mix through the feed tube. Process very briefly, then add the ramps and process again, pulsing in spurts to mix the ramps.

The dough will be quite soft and sticky. Turn it out onto a lightly floured board and knead three or four strokes, then shape into a fat disc and refrigerate, covered, for at least half an hour.

When you’re ready to bake the biscuits, turn the oven on to 400º (205º C). Cover a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

On a lightly floured board, roll the dough out to a layer that’s about ½ to ¾ inch (1 to 1.5 cm) thick. Use a 2-inch (5 cm) biscuit cutter to cut out a dozen rounds and set them on the parchment lined sheet, gently touching but not overlapping. (If you can’t quite get a dozen out of the first try, simply roll up the dough, give it a quick knead, and roll it out again in order to cut more.)

Brush each biscuit top with a little of the cream, then transfer the sheet to the hot oven. Bake for about 30 to 40 minutes, until the tops are toasty.

These are best served hot straight from the oven, with butter melting on the insides. They’re great with a suppertime salad or soup and excellent for snacking on at any time of day.

Note that for breakfast, you can make the dough the night before and refrigerate, well covered, until the next morning, then just bake the biscuits off for a splendid breakfast with those ramp-flavored scrambled eggs.

NB: Astute readers may have noted that nowhere do I mention fiddleheads, another acclaimed woodland wonder. That’s because I really-truly dislike fiddleheads, even though they’re said to be a great Maine favorite. Sorry, but not in my Maine!