Old Scapes

Someone at the community garden left these garlic scapes on the compost pile.
They were old and tough.
Chewing on the green stem was like chewing on a stalk of grass, except very garlic.

I took them home and separated to stems from the flowers.
In a pressure cooker I put the rinsed stems,a neutral oil and a little water.
After 20 minutes at high pressure, the oil was green and the stalks were still woody.
Using the same oil and new stems, I ran the pressure cooker for 30 minutes this time.

After this , I poured the oil through a strainer into a stove top pan filled with garlic flowers.
I chopped them and cooked them, strained the oil and jarred the flowers.
I might have cooked them too long, there was a little bitterness when I tasted them strait, but stirred into beans, they were great.

Using a the same process with the same oil, I cooked the stems and flowers of the green onions Id harvested from my house.

This time I purposefully "overcooked" the onion flowers, in an attempt to caramelize them.

My take away is this: waiting for  alliums to flower means tough greens that are only fit for broth or infusions.

Given the same find, if the flowers had mature bulbils, I'd have harvested them for planting and if not, put them in a vase of water to let them mature. And I don't know about the oil thing you did, but I always make broth in the pressure cooker from the woody scape stalks.