Consider the Chive Tea Latte

Make it dirty or clean, as long as it’s green.

Every now and then, a reader question will come through at exactly the right moment—for the growing season, for The Discourse, or for the weather of my whims.

This week’s question, from Adam F., manages all three:

Are the green onions that grow wild in our yard the same thing as the chives we buy in the grocery store? Have I been throwing money away on fancy rebranded grass‽‽ 

First off, Adam, thank you for the interrobangs. Although I do not yet have any tattoos due to a debilitating fear of commitment, I have long fantasized about getting an interrobang tattooed in the center of my forehead like an incredulous Harry Potter.

Your question is well timed, as I have been tasting many things in my yard. I recently took a class through the Missouri Department of Conservation titled “Wild Edibles,” which might credibly have been subtitled “Foraging for Dinguses.” During the class, a kind old man showed us pictures of all of the weeds in our yard and told us we could eat them in a salad, provided we enjoyed salads that tasted like weeds. At one point, he tried to teach us to identify poisonous lookalikes, but it was difficult to hear him over the sound of gunfire. For Missouri reasons, the course was being held at a shooting range.

The short answer is that your Yard Onions are not the same as Whole Foods Chives. The slightly less short answer is that you can still use them (almost) interchangeably.

Without traipsing through Adam’s yard, it’s hard to know for sure, but most of the onion-scented weeds that crop up in Kansas City this time of year are a species known as “wild garlic” or “onion grass”—allium vineale versus the culinary chives’ allium schoenoprasum. Because nature is confusing, they look exactly like “garlic chives” (allium tuberosum), a non-native allium that’s less likely to spread on its own. Because botanists are fickle, there’s another species, allium ursinum, that’s also called “wild garlic.” Do with this what you will. As a general rule, if it smells like an onion, you’re probably OK.¹

You can use wild garlic much as you would use scallions or chives, with the caveat that the greens are a little tougher and more fibrous. As a result, I don’t super recommend mincing it and eating it raw—usually, I chop the stalks into two-inch pieces (both greens and whites) and toss them into a pot of beans or soup, where they can infuse the broth with their lovely funk and I can easily fish them out.

See if you can Spot the Difference:

Wild garlic on top, chives on bottom.

Technically, I found both of these in my yard, since I have a small patch of chives in my garden. You should plant a patch of chives, too, if you like them! Chives are one of the easiest things in the world to grow. I transplanted a few six years ago into parched, clay-heavy soil and have ignored them since—they have returned year after year despite my best efforts to kill them with afternoon sun and neglect.

Here’s how you can use them up:

Introducing: the Chive Tea Latte

After developing Chicken Drink, I felt immediate guilt over excluding vegetarian and/or sober Haterade subscribers from the world of savory drinks. So this week, I decided to chart the terrra incognoble of savory coffee and make a chive tea latte.

Why am I doing this? I can think of at least two reasons:

1) Someone misspoke while trying to order a chai latte 10 years ago, and now we are all paying the price.

Look, if the chive tea latte is a mondegreen, it is also a linguistic improvement. It solves for the redundancy problem of the “chai tea latte,” which means “tea tea latte” and makes many people justifiably mad.

2) The part of my brain that registers disgust has been stunted from exposure to rat contraceptives.

This one seems more plausible. I’m genuinely curious about the dearth of savory coffee drinks in the world and cocky enough to try my hand at making one. But I’m not sure that curiosity always translates for people. Disgust is a powerful emotion, one most of us do our best to avoid. Wading into it on purpose can seem like a prank—we say people do disgusting things for “shock value” because we can’t conceive of another kind.

I’ve been thinking about all this lately while I read Marni Kessler’s Discomfort Food: The Culinary Imagination in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art, a book that contains many thoughtful reflections on the lives of eels in Manet paintings. Although I’m not a very sophisticated Art Looker, I like Kessler’s book because it punctures the superficial romance around food in general (and French food in particular) while remaining deeply invested in and curious about the subject—an ambition I share.

Don’t get me wrong: a pat of fresh, pale butter is a beautiful thing, worthy of (and relentlessly subject to) paintings and paeans. But like most beautiful things, the butter eventually turns rancid. Our reaction to it then is just as intense—and to me, just as interesting.

As Kessler says:

“Images of gastronomic things, like their analogues in the physical world, are necessarily bound up in every single aspect of what makes us human.”

Anyway, here’s a photograph of my aura:

I don’t know how to make latte art, but I do know how to make a latte Art.

Let’s make some tea!

To live up to the “Chive Tea Latte” premise, I started by brewing a big pot of chive tea. For a more dynamic blend, I used two kinds of chives—the regular ol’ culinary chives from my garden and the Weedy Pretenders from my front landscaping. I minced both green boys up, tossed the mess into the infuser basket of my teapot, and steeped them in boiling water for about 10 minutes to yield a more concentrated ~allium aroma.~

The resulting tea was undeniably onion-y, but I wasn’t sure it was going to cut through the steamed milk. I decided I had better infuse the milk as well. To keep the latte vegan-friendly, I simmered some more chives—both kinds again—in some “barista blend” oat milk, which tasted like neither oats nor milk.

After about 10 minutes, I strained out the chives and used the steam wand of my espresso machine to froth the milk.

You could use just about any other kind of Alternative Milk here, but for frothing purposes, you’re going to want to look at two things: the protein content (the higher, the better) and whether the ingredients list contains “gellan gum.” Now is not the time to get squeamish about food additives: like a perverted periodontist, you want to taste those gums. Gellan is going to give you a much more stable milk foam that doesn’t dissipate the second you add your chive garnish.

True enough, my be-gummed oat milk frothed beautifully. I gently spooned the foam over the chive tea and took a test sip of my creation.

It tasted exactly like you’d expect, which is to say: like Hot Chive Water with Onion Milk. At this point, I realized I hadn’t made a latte—I had made a watery onion soubise.

The only thing left to do was to make it dirty. I pulled a single shot of espresso, topped it with about 4 ounces of the chive tea, and then spooned in more Onion Foam. The drink now tasted like hot soup with espresso in it, which was marginally more tolerable.

Please ignore the dying yucca plant in the background; everything I love wilts spitefully in my presence

I will not lie to you: I did not finish the drink. It tasted exactly like the sum of its parts and gave me coffee breath and garlic breath simultaneously. The chive tea latte is emphatically not a “hot girl drink.”

But I still believe in what she represents—I believe in the image of the latte as well as the analogue. Trying to love difficult things has been a 32-year project, and I have no intention of abandoning it now.²

I believe in drinking in season, drinking it dirty, foraging for whatever nutrients we can.

It might sound disgusting, but this is the future liberals want.

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1. In contrast, if you smell like an onion, you should wash your bra.

2. I also just really like puns.