This is Recipe Roundup, Episode 107. Despite the lingering random snow shower, it IS Spring and in the mountains that means we have access to some tasty treats that you can’t find just anywhere, namely ramps and morel mushrooms. My dream Appalachian Spring meal is smoked wild turkey with a morel mushroom gravy and ramp butter – there is really nothing like the combination of those flavors. 

If you don’t know, morel mushrooms are a spring time favorite of Appalachia. Unlike many other popular culinary mushroom varieties, morels are not spongy and do not have gills under their caps. Instead, they have a more waxy texture and an irregular honeycomb formation. They are absolutely delicious and will sometimes convince even the most virulent of mushroom haters. 

Ramps are a type of wild onion that are popular in this area. It seems to me that people either love or hate them – compared to cultivated onion varieties, ramps pack a garlicky punch and are very pungent, almost stinky. I’ve also heard some anecdotal stories about stomach upsets from eating too many of them – I feel like this can often be mitigated by cooking the ramps so they are easier to digest. 

Last weekend, we unfortunately did not find any morels, but we picked plenty of ramps and I decided to chop some of them for ramp butter. You could make this without melting down the butter, but I wanted to really gett a lot of ramp flavor and cook down the plant fibers a little bit. 

You’ll need 

1 stick of butter – I recommend Kerrygold for a tasty finishing butter like this, but anything will work

5- 10 ramps chopped, you can use both the stem and the green for this. 

1. Make sure to wash your ramps very well – I like to submerge mine in a water bath with just a splash of vinegar and then rinse them well. 
2. Finely chop the ramps as you melt your butter on low heat. 
3. Mix the ramps into the butter and turn the heat up just enough to begin to bubble. 
4. Cook until the ramps are softened and the melted butter has a light green tinge to it. 
5. Pour into a dish and refrigerate until ready to use. 
6. We put this on top of burgers as a finishing butter, but it would be excellent on toasty bread.