Garlic chives
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Garlic chives, also known as Chinese chives, Chinese leek, Ku chai or Nira is a relatively new vegetable in the English-speaking world. The plant has a distinctive growth habit with strap-shaped leaves unlike either onion or garlic and straight thin white-flowering stalks that are much taller than the leaves.
Chinesechives.jpg
It grows in slowly expanding perennial clumps, but also readily sprouts from seed. It is not only an interesting vegetable, but a very attractive flower. The cultivated form is Allium tuberosum while the wild form is placed as A. ramosum. Older references list it as A. odorum but that is now considered a synonym of A. ramosum. Some botanists would place both wild and cultivated forms in A. ramosum since many intermediate forms exist.
The flavor of garlic chives is rather more like garlic than chives, though much milder. Both leaves and the stalks of the flowers are used as a flavoring similarly to chives, green onions or garlic and are used as a stir fry ingredient. In China, they are often blanched by covering them in the spring. The flowers may also be used as a spice.
Many garden centers carry it (usually unaware of its culinary uses) as do most oriental specialty groceries if they have fresh produce at all.
In Chinese it is called 韭/jiu3 or 韭菜/jiu3cai4.
External links
- Evolution, Domestication and Taxonomy (http://131.173.31.100/publications/Ch1Taxonomy%20and%20Evolution%20Allium.pdf) of Allium (PDF)