How To Make Garlic Scape Butter – Simple Recipe (Video)
Learn how to make garlic scape butter with this time-tested simple recipe that will take so many of your from scratch dishes up a notch! Garlic scape butter is a combination of simple ingredients that can be frozen for several months and used on steaks, pasta, burgers, garlic bread and many other things. I like to have garlic scape butter in my freezer to give my food that special summer flavor even in the dead of winter. I’m also always looking for new ways to preserve the things I grow in my garden, and this is an excellent way to preserve garlic scapes.
What Are Garlic Scapes?
Garlic scapes are the flower bud portion of hardneck garlic plants. Garlic is typically planted in the fall similar to a flower bulb like a tulip, and is one of the first things growing in the early spring garden. As it grows, it gets bigger and produces more leaves and in early summer puts out this curly shoot from the middle of the plant called a garlic scape. For a nice tender scape, harvest when still fairly small. You can harvest it by snapping it off where it joins the plant. If left to grow, these scapes will turn into a garlic flower to help the garlic plant reproduce.
Since we are most interested in harvesting a nice garlic bulb with good sized garlic cloves, we always make sure to pick off all the garlic scapes soon after they appear. This encourages it to put all of the plant’s energy into growing a large bulb. If you do not harvest the garlic scapes, the bulb of garlic will be small and not as useful for cooking or re-planting.
How To Use Garlic Scapes
I love garlic scapes so much, that if all I got out of growing garlic were the scapes, then I would be happy! They have a mild garlic flavor and are amazing roasted or sauteed, in garlic scape pesto, pickled, dried into garlic powder, made into compound butter or used in cooking in place of regular garlic. When I harvest garlic scapes, I’m usually running low on my stored garlic from the previous years garden, and ready for something fresh. I use them in place of garlic until we harvest our garlic bulbs about 3-4 weeks after harvesting the scapes, usually in early July. Garlic scapes can be stored in a grocery bag in the refrigerator for at least 4 weeks. This is helpful because you don’t have to process right away after harvesting them.
Tips:
- You can easily slice off frozen garlic scape compound butter and lay it on slices of bread. Toast in the oven on broil for a delicious garlic bread to go with any italian meal.
- Add fresh herbs or even a little lemon juice to the mixture to make a garlic herb compound butter.
- If you don’t have any garlic scapes, you can usually purchase some in the late spring at your local farmer’s market.
- Place some garlic scape butter on steaks or burgers when they’re almost done cooking to give them some extra garlicky flavor. This makes steaks extra special for in home date nights or other special occasions.
- If using unsalted butter, be sure to add 1/2 teaspoon of salt to the softened butter mixture.
- Chop garlic scapes into small pieces in the food processor or blender before adding butter.
- You can use the whole garlic scape for making compound butter, but I like to take off the thin end because it can sometimes be woody and hard to blend up.
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Tools You May Need:
Ingredients:
Fresh garlic scapes
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Salted butter – I like to use my homemade butter, but you can use any butter you’d like.
How To Make Garlic Scape Butter
In the bowl of a food processor place garlic scapes. Chop and then estimate the amount of scapes you have. You want one pound of chopped scapes per one pound of butter approximately.
Once garlic scapes are finely chopped, add room-temperature butter.
Process until scapes and butter are well combined.
Place on a long piece of plastic wrap.
Roll up and form into a log. Twist the ends shut.
Place in the freezer. You can put it into a freezer bag as well if you’d like. Good for several months.
Garlic Scape Butter
Ingredients
- 1 cup chopped garlic scapes
- 1 lb butter softened
Instructions
- In the bowl of a food processor place garlic scapes. Chop and then estimate the amount of scapes you have. You want one pound of chopped scapes per one pound of butter approximately.
- Once garlic scapes are finely chopped, add room-temperature butter.
- Process until scapes and butter are well combined.
- Place on a long piece of plastic wrap.
- Roll up and form into a log. Twist the ends shut.
- Place in the freezer. You can put it into a freezer bag as well if you'd like. Good for several months.
