Hello, everyone! Jess here. Let’s get to the clover flowers, shall we?
I am admittedly far from being an expert when it comes to clover flowers, but I was definitely up to the challenge of learning as much as possible about them over these past few days. I perused my usual cookbooks and veggie notes, but wasn’t turning up very much (read: anything) about clover flowers, let alone clover flowers being used in recipes.
I took a trip to the library and looked through every foraging book I could find. Backyard Foraging, Gather Ye Wild Things, The World of Plant Life, Using Wayside Plants, and several others. Here’s a summary of what I learned:
- Many foraging, herb, flower and cookbooks left out clovers entirely.
- Red clover’s latin name is Trifolium Pratense, Trifolium meaning “three leaves”, which you see often on clover plants!
- The red clover is the official state flower of Vermont!
- The red clover is more purple, wouldn’t you say?
- Red clover is a member of the legume family, hence, I would imagine, is where it gets its bean-like flavor.
- There are not too many recipes out there being attempted when it comes to eating clover flowers. It seems more about the extraction of the flavor from the flower.
- Red clovers have a medicinal quality, and teas and tinctures are a popular use for them. They are known for soothing coughs and other respiratory distress.
- There are precautions with clover flower use if you are pregnant, and they have been known to cause bloating in excess.
- One can roll and smoke dried clover petals in an herbal cigarette.
When I picked up a bag of clover flowers from the farm stand, I pulled off a petal or two to taste the sweet grassy bean flavor. I noted that if not used right away, the sweetness of the flowers can quickly diminish. Is this maybe why they are not used for cooking very often? This notion made me want to try to candy the flower with a bit of egg white and superfine sugar, perhaps this would preserve it’s sweetness.
My candied clover flower attempts. (I apologize for the blurriness of this picture!)
The results were not as good as I had hoped. The outside of the flowers were ok, but the petals seem to almost pull in and toughen up the longer they are off the plant, much like the choke in the center of an artichoke. Here’s what you’re left with when you pull off the petals:
You can see the little choke-like bit in the middle that the petals attach to. This part is not to pleasant to ingest in my opinion.
For now, the sugared flower idea will stay reserved for the pansies in the herb garden.
Prepping a pansy with a paintbrush in preparation for sugaring. (Say that 5 times fast!)
I thought maybe I’d try a clover flower soup, or a pickled clover flower, but after reading about the clover adventures of sister blogger Wild Food Girl, aside from tossing a few into my chicken stock last night, I decided to focus my energies elsewhere.
Some parsley, clover leaves, chives and chive flowers helped with the flavoring of this stock. I can’t say that I could distinguish the clover leaf flavor over the others in the stock, but if I had some clover flowers around, I’d do it again.
Next, I started a clover vinegar in my Krautsource (not sure how this will do scaled down, but we’ll know in about a week if it’s working), and a clover tincture. It’ll be a while before I know how these turned out, but it it’s worth shouting from the rooftops, I’ll keep you posted!
Lastly, I went with the tea. Ahh, the tea… Now this is my favorite use so far! I know that Farmer Jamie and her mother Paula like the tea, and I see why! Paula was telling me she’ll mix clover flowers, mint, some lemon and lime slices, and “whatever else around that’s good” in a jar. She sets the jar in the sun for a spell for a delicious sun tea. It’s pretty great!
I made a clover flower only tea, just to see what the taste was like on it’s own. I put a bunch of the blossoms and leaves into a large mason jar, and covered it with water that was brought just to a boil. After about 15 minutes, I strained out the flowers and had a red clover tea! The subtle grassiness is free from bitterness and has a surprising sweetness. I could get used to this!
Fellow Springdellian Sharon M. tried this soda bread from Leda Meredith! Sharon reports it to be a “nice tender soda bread with interesting bits.” It seems that baking may be a good way to work these into a dish. I won’t spoil the surprise, but stay tuned as Sarah ventures into baked good land with her clover flowers!
Can you believe a pound of these dried clover flowers costs about 20 dollars on Amazon? If you can’t decide what you want to do with them today, simply dry them in a dehydrator or in the oven at a low temp. I preheated my oven to about 300 last night, shut off the oven, popped the clover flowers in on a wire rack, and left the clover flowers in overnight to save some time, then finished at a low temp the next day. (You can also air dry in a dark warm ventilated and dry place over a 1-3 weeks). If you have these in your pantry, it sounds like you’ll thank yourself when cold and cough season kicks in!
Aaaaaaand I’m spent. I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip around the kitchen with these flowers, and I also hope this saves you some legwork. If you have ideas that you find are good, please let us know, as 200 cooks are better than two!