Garlic Chives: The Flat-Leaved Allium of Chinese Cooking, and How to Use It

In Chinese cooking, garlic chives are treated more as a vegetable than a garnish: chopped into dumpling fillings, stir-fried, and sold in three distinct forms, green, flowering and yellow. They’re the flat, strap-like leaves of Allium tuberosum, a clump-forming perennial in the onion genus, and they taste and smell of garlic, but gently. They don’t keep long, either: fresh leaves last only 2–3 days, even when chilled.

At a glance

What garlic chives are

Allium tuberosum is a perennial herb 20–40 cm tall that grows in dense clumps. Its leaves are linear and flat, 13–45 cm long and 2–10 mm wide, and it carries white, star-shaped flowers in umbels 3–5 cm across, followed by small black seeds.² Kew places it in the Amaryllidaceae and describes it as a bulbous geophyte of the temperate biome.³ (PROSEA, an older reference, files it under Liliaceae, the family the genus used to sit in.²)

It’s grown as a ratoon crop: the leaves are cut, grow back, and get harvested again from the same plants, starting three to four months after planting.

Garlic chives are a different species from common chives; see garlic chives vs. chives. They also aren’t garlic scapes, which are the flower stalks hardneck garlic sends up in early summer.

Where they come from

The two main references disagree on the wild range:

Kew lists Japan, Korea, Mongolia, the Philippines, Thailand and several US states among the places where the plant was introduced, not native. PROSEA records it under cultivation in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Nepal, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States.

History

PROSEA says garlic chives were certainly grown in China by the 10th century and probably as early as 200 BC.² You’ll often see a cultivation history of 3,000 years or more; we found no source for it. PROSEA notes the crop matters a great deal in China, Japan and Taiwan but is only a minor vegetable in Southeast Asia, that no production statistics exist, and that international trade seems negligible.

Flavor and the compounds behind it

PROSEA says the leaves taste and smell mildly of garlic.² The Woks of Life describes a strong garlicky fragrance and calls them more vegetal than herbal.⁴ Both are fair: the smell is pronounced when you cut a bunch, and in a cooked dish the taste is softer than garlic itself.

A 2022 study in Molecules identified 59 volatile compounds in Chinese chive using headspace sampling, and found dimethyl trisulfide the most abundant, at 10,623.30 µg/kg in the samples tested.¹ Of the aroma categories the authors scored, a “garlic and onion” odor beat all the others. Those figures come from one study’s samples and method, so don’t read them as a fixed value for the plant.

The three forms

Chinese markets sell garlic chives in three forms, and they aren’t interchangeable.

PROSEA describes how the yellow form is produced: in China, clumps are grown in darkness to get etiolated leaves.² It also notes that flower stalks are usually harvested for eating and are commonly sold in markets in Malaysia and Thailand. The buds and opened flowers are edible.

How garlic chives are used

Both the leaves and young flower heads are used to season food, eaten blanched or green. The Woks of Life treats the leaves more as a vegetable than an herb and recommends them for stir-fries and dumpling fillings, and notes that yellow chives often show up in Cantonese noodle and seafood dishes.⁴

Beyond that:

• Dumplings and buns. Chopped finely and mixed with pork, shrimp or egg as a filling.
• Stir-fries. Cut into short lengths and tossed in a hot wok with egg, bean sprouts, pork or tofu, cooked just until wilted. Flowering chives take a little longer.
• Eggs. Folded into scrambled eggs or an omelet.
• Raw. Thinly sliced as a garnish, used the way you’d use chives but with a garlic note.

The leaves are thin, so long cooking leaves them limp and olive-colored; most recipes add them near the end.

For more, see garlic chives substitutes and garlic.

Buying and storage

Look for bunches with firm, flat, evenly colored leaves and no slimy or yellowing tips (yellow chives are pale by design).

Garlic chives don’t keep long. PROSEA says the fresh leaves can be stored for only 2–3 days at 0–2 °C, and that finely cut leaves are suitable for freezing.² It also notes that leaves are cut, bunched and sold as fresh as possible. Freezing chopped leaves is the practical way to keep a surplus for cooked dishes.

Nutrition

You eat garlic chives in bigger amounts than most herbs, but they’re still mostly water. PROSEA gives this composition for the leaves, per 100 g edible portion:²

That’s a fair amount of vitamin C for a leafy vegetable and very little fiber. Popular lists that call garlic chives rich in fiber, calcium, iron or riboflavin aren’t supported by the sources we reviewed.

PROSEA records traditional medicinal uses in Asia, against tumors, intestinal disorders and lung infections, and as an aid to recovering from fatigue.² Those are folk uses, not evidence that they work, and we’re not claiming garlic chives treat or prevent any disease.

Substitutes and comparisons

As a starting point: for raw use, common chives with a very small amount of finely grated garlic come closest; for cooked dishes, scallion greens with a little garlic work. Taste and adjust.

• Garlic chives substitutes
• Garlic chives vs. chives
• Chives and chives substitutes
• Garlic scapes
• Garlic