Lamium purpureum

Lamium purpureum

Purple Dead Nettle may be bit scary for the name of an edible plant, but this is one plant that I am liking a lot, if I cook it right. The right way to cook it is to boil it. If you eat it raw or cook it other ways, it seems fairly average in flavor.

closer view of flowers

But first, to identify it, look for a mint (square stems, opposite leaves) with purplish flowers, which are two-lipped, with spots on the lower lip. In Lamium purpureum (Purple Dead Nettle) the leaves have petioles (stems) and are clustered at the top of the stem. The uppermost leaves are usually tinged with purple color as well. On the other hand, if the leaves clasp the stem (sessile, no leaf-stems) and are more widely spaced along the stem, you have found Lamium amplexifolium (Henbit Dead Nettle). If the leaves have white spots or patches, you have found Lamium maculatum (Spotted Dead Nettle). There are also Dead Nettle species with white or yellow flowers. By most accounts, Purple is the best tasting kind of Dead Nettle.

One nice thing about these flowers, is that the sepals (green bracts at the base of the flower) are soft and edible as well. (Horehound and Motherwort are examples of mints with stiff and sharp sepals.) This means you can break off the entire top leafy part of the plant and eat or cook it whole (leaves, stem, flowers, and sepals), resulting is a larger vegetable that doesn't get lost in a stew the way individual leaves might. 

You can eat this whole top raw. It is soft instead of crisp, so not especially good as a salad green. It is a bit hairy, so the texture is not the best. But it is mild for a mint, with no strong or unpleasant aftertaste. Some describe it as earthy, which is not unfair. So expect a mildly minty, earthy flavor from it. Not bad, but also not something I would seek out for the fine flavor.

I tried cooking it in several ways. Frying in butter did not improve the flavor much. The texture is better that way, since it comes out slightly crisp instead of soft-hairy. It was pretty good cooked with egg. The flavor does not stand out, but it is a good addition to an omelet, and well worth eating this way.

The best way to cook it is to boil or steam it for about 3 minutes. I notice that the steam coming from the cook pot has an odd or funky smell at first. This may indicate that there is a volatile oil being boiled off, which can explain the change in flavor. After about three minutes, the steam seems to smell sweeter, so this is probably a good indicator of when it is done cooking. The flavor is much improved, in my opinion, and much less earthy. The boiled flavor can almost be described as sweet. The boiled version is the flavor that I want to eat more of. 

The earthy flavor seems to be left behind in the water. It is not bitter or unpleasant, so it can be drunk as a tea. It would not be a bad additional flavor to a soup or stew, so while I haven't tried it that way yet, I would not pre-boil and discard the water. I would just add them directly to the soup and wait for the volatile oils to boil off.