CREAMY WILD GARLIC SOUP WITH DANDELION LEAVES (VEGAN)

Wild garlic / Ramson can be found at many places in Vienna at this time of the year, therefore my new recipe today is a very simple, but wonderful recipe for a wild garlic soup with dandelion leaves. The soup works out without any whipped cream, but is still deliciously creamy. Also, I added some dandelion leaves, so the soup is not that much garlicky. The daisy flowers at the pictures are of course primarily for decoration, but you can eat them too if you like.

Picking Wild Garlic By Yourself

Wild garlic can be bought at many stores at the moment, but during the season you may also just pick some of it yourself. In Vienna, wild garlic grows on many places. For example, I've seen quite a few growing in Augarten and also at the Schönbrunn Palace Gardens up near the Gloriette. On goodnight.at, a digital city magazine for Vienna (Site in German), there are cited some other places for wild garlic, such as the Castle Park Pötzleinsdorf, the Donau-Auen, the Vienna Woods, the Lainzer Tiergarten, the Steinhofgründe or the Prater.

Attention: Do not confuse wild garlic with the following plants:

Before picking the wild garlic leaves you should rub a piece of the plant between your fingers and smell it. If it has that typical garlic odor, it's wild garlic. Please be careful when your fingers allready have that smell after collecting. Wild garlic can be confused with autumn crocus and lily of the valley, which are both toxic. Although lilies grow a little later, autumn crocuses' leaves grow about the same time and in the same places as wild garlic.

On this page, the differences between wild garlic and similar-looking, but toxic plants is explained and pctured very well.

So please do collect some information, before you walk into the wild and get yourself poisoned...

So this is how you make the creamy wild garlic soup with dandelion leaves:

[ingredients title="Ingredients for 4 people"]

• 1 onion
• 1 handful of wild garlic / ramson
• 1 handful of dandelion leaves
• 1-2 large potatoes, raw or already cooked
• ¾l vegetable broth {Americans: 3 cups}

[/ingredients]

[ingredients title="Equipment needed"]

• Hand Blender or Blender
• 1 Pot

[/ingredients]

[directions title="Directions"]

1. Cut onion and fry with a little oil in the pan, until translucent / slightly browned
2. Pour vegetable stock
3. Peel Potatoes, if they are still raw, grate into soup. If they are already cooked, simply cut into small pieces and add to the soup.
4. The potatoes cause the "creaminess" of the soup (instead of whipped cream, sour cream or roux / flour sweat). Therefore, they should be overcooked until they are very soft and fall apart on their own.
5. After about 10 minutes of cooking, cut the wild garlic and dandelion leaves into pieces and cook for 2-3 minutes
6. Puree with a blender or hand blender puree until the soup is creamy

[/directions]

Mahlzeit, everyone, enjoy your wild garlic soup!

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