Why New York Is Celebrating a Vegetable This Weekend (Ramp Festival)

Take a trip to New York’s Hudson Valley to taste one of the season’s most elusive flavors.

Now that the seemingly endless winter is truly over, there are harbingers of spring everywhere: cherry trees blooming, arms and toes exposed. For foodies, the change in seasons is exciting for another reason: For a very brief moment, farmers’ markets will be overrun with ramps, a spring vegetable that’s also known as a wild leek. Its flavor is pungent, sort of like a cross between a spring onion and garlic, and its presentation varied: pickled, grilled, used in pesto, as a pizza topping…the list goes on. Because of their scarcity—ramps show up early in the season in the northeast, mid-Atlantic, and Midwest, then hit their peak for just a few weeks—they’re enormously popular among the food obsessed; in the past week alone, Eater.com, Bon Appetit,and Serious Eats have all published articles extolling the elusive allium’s virtues.

​Read article here.