From wild garlic to saltwater tomatoes – here are the highlights of the culinary season.

Any chef worth their rock salt will use fresh, sustainable ingredients as the foundation of their dishes, and March ­– the beginning of spring – represents one of the most exciting times for new produce coming into season. It stands to reason, then, that they will have their hawk eyes trained on the best seasonal ingredients this month. But what about us? Keen to find out exactly what we should be cooking with, and more importantly, eating, this March, we asked three of London’s most exciting chefs (at the helm of three of the best new restaurants) for the ingredients they’re most looking forward to working with in the coming weeks – and what they plan to do with them. In short, if you see any of these on the menu in the coming weeks – you should pounce on them.

Mr Eyal Jagermann – head chef, The Barbary

“I love March, when the weather warms up and new and exciting fruit and vegetables start coming in to the restaurant. I am crazy for artichokes in all shapes and sizes, but especially mammole artichokes, which are coming into season now. We get them from the Fondi food market in Lazio, Italy. These are large artichokes with big heads, meaty leaves and thick stalks.”

How to eat them

“They are really good to cook whole, and also perfect for a dish that we make at The Barbary – Carciofi Al-Quds. It is based on a classic Italian dish, Carciofi alla Romana. The outer leaves are trimmed to reveal the head, which is stuffed with garlic, salt and black pepper and then it is cooked face down in olive oil and some water. The artichokes soften and take in the garlic flavour. The whole artichoke can then be served with salsa verde. Delicious.

“We use the same simple technique before grilling the artichokes and serving them with tahini-sumac sauce, harissa aioli and garlic and chilli breadcrumbs for the crunch. The flavours of the smoky garlicky artichokes are amazing with the tahini, and the harissa aioli gives it a spicy kick. This is one of my favourite dishes this season at The Barbary.”

Mr Ben Chapman – founder, Kiln and Smoking Goat

“An ingredient that I’m excited about cooking with at the moment are Raf tomatoes. These are a Spanish kind of winter tomato that are partly fed with saltwater found in Almeria in southern Spain. You can buy them from Natoora shops. The dull winter sun and saltwater means that the plant struggles and grows slowly, but a plant has to struggle to be delicious. The result is fruit that is densely sweet and salty.”

**How to eat them **

“Good chefs often talk about trying to do as little as possible to good ingredients. These don’t even need salt because the seawater seasons them from the inside. I don’t know of anything else that you can just slice up, heap on a plate, and serve as a dish that I would put next to anything coming out of ambitious restaurant kitchens. Raf tomatoes are a reminder of how dedicated, quiet attention to detail results in something more powerful than complicated shouty things. A really simple way to enjoy these tomatoes is to eat them with smoked mackerel; lightly fry some good smoked mackerel in a pan and eat it with tomatoes and bread.”

Mr Isaac McHale – chef-owner, Luca and The Clove Club

“Spring is a great time for chefs, because green things start to burst forth. The first exciting ingredient for me at this time is ramsons, or wild garlic. It is just starting to appear in nature, and in great veg shops right now. Chefs are always keen to use it after a few months of working with root vegetables. It’s something that has been foraged for years in Britain, long before foraging became a trend.”

How to eat it

“We have done several things over the years with ramsons at The Clove Club. I especially love a spring garlic soup, and I am looking forward to approaching it from a different angle at Luca. We want to make wild garlic agnolotti [a type of stuffed pasta], filled with wild garlic and ricotta, and a rabbit stew with wild garlic and green olive.”

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