Gilroy (home of a famous garlic festival, and ten miles down the road) kin kizz my ass. They don’t even grow much garlic anymore, and they grow only one variety – California Late – because of its storability on supermarket shelves. Garlic comes in a couple of hundred of varieties from all over the world, and the differences between them can be astounding. Some are better for roasting whole, some are better raw, some are best sauteed.
After corresponding with the famous garlic grower, Chester Aaron, I purchased about twenty varieties of seed garlic and planted them all in my raised beds last October. I’ve now harvested and cured about 100 fat, heavy heads of garlic and have just started cooking with it.
How, you may ask, does homegrown varietal garlic taste compared with supermarket garlic? In a word, fantabulous! And that’s just one variety, Tuscan White, because it was picked and cured first and is the only one ready right now. I’ve only done two dishes with it: parmesan garlic cheese bread, and linguine with white clam sauce. The Tuscan White garlic made a delicious difference with the results.
Linguine recipe:
Saute 3 chopped cloves of garlic in olive oil in a big skillet. Add big pinch or two of dried chile flakes and 1/2 cup white wine. Dump in 2 pounds of washed clams. Cover and steam until clams pop open and serve them, with the pan juices, atop linguine. Just before serving, shave a couple of slices of raw garlic over the hot clams using a potato peeler and garnish generously with chopped Italian parsley. Serve with lots of crusty Italian bread to sop up the garlicky clam juices.
I foresee many garlic-centered meals coming up, as I have those 100 bulbs of 20 varieties to use up. I could do a search for that recipe for “Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic,” but it’s more fun to ask you guys, whose taste I trust. Has anybody ever prepared this dish? Got a good recipe?
Gilroy doesn’t grow much garlic anymore? Bummer, man. I remember travelling through Gilroy on vacation once, when I was a kid. We had a hard time finding a motel room, because the “Garlic Festival” was going on. And, the whole damned town smelled of garlic!
When I travel through Gilroy now, I always hit “Garlic World” (http://www.garlicworld.com) and pick up some garlic goodies.
Where do you get these garlic seeds, by the way? Your garlic recipes sound great!
If I ever get my act together, I’m going to start a little veggie garden. It sounds like I might consider planting some garlic if it’s that good home grown.
Hey! I’ve got a great idea! Let’s invite a bunch of people over from the vampire boards and whip up a feast made with lots, and lots of different kinds of garlic! Come on, it’ll be fun watching all of them thrash about!
Note: No vampires were harmed in the making of this post, nor is this post advocating the mass murder of vampires, nor their hangers on. It was merely posted for your amusement.
yosemitebabe, Gilroy still sells garlic; it just trucks it all in from the Central Valley nowadays. Garlic plants grow from the same cloves that you peel before cooking; just stick 'em an inch or two down, unpeeled, pointed side up. Garlic starters are available online from lots of different seed catalogue people, but I got mine from garlicmaster Chester Aaron. Here’s a link to a good article about Chester, garlic, and Gilroy:
His email is towards the bottom of the article, along with a couple of other interesting links. He’s quite a character, and there’s nothing he doesn’t know about garlic. Sonofagun lives just inland of Bodega Bay, California, which as you know is about the most beautiful part of the state.
scout1222, garlic’s extremely easy to grow and you don’t need acres of room. The only drawback is that it stays in the ground for six months, keeping you from planting anything else during that time. However, since it grows over the winter, at least you’re not displacing tomatoes or basil or anything else necessary to life.
John Thorne’s book Outlaw Cook has recipes for Chicken with Forty Cloves of garlic, and another for the same thing with lamb. I’ve tried the chicken one, and it was glorious. Also, have you ever make skordalia? Greek potato-garlic-olive oil dip. It’s similar in concept to tzatziki. I love it.
I especiallly love the hardneck varieties of garlic, that’s about all I grow now. You get an added bonus with these as you cut off the top part of the main stem, called a scape, to encourage the bulb to grow bigger and then you can eat the scapes. A nice, mild garlicky flavor. The Garlic Store has nice planting stock and other neat stuff.
My current crop isn’t quite ready yet, but soon… it’ll be a garlic feast! Plus I’ve got some nice basil this year for whipping up pots of pesto. Yay!
