Garlic - The Stinking Rose

The weekend is here and it's finally feeling like spring!

Spring means it's time for planting! I'm excited about starting on the farm, but also sad I won't be actively tending my home garden this year. If you haven't planned out your garden for this year, and need a place to start, check out www.growveg.com. They make a virtual garden planning tool which you can use to figure out planting dates, spacing, care, etc. There is a 30-day free trial which will give you plenty of time to plan your garden. If you can't decide what to plant this year, my suggestion is to plant what you love to eat!

I love garlic. I love the smell, the heat, its culinary uses, and best of all, it helps keep pests away in my garden. I planted several varieties of garlic last fall including: Elephant, Korean, Music, and Chesnok. Hopefully they will still turn out with minimal care. As long as spring doesn't come too early, we probably won't experience another bout of "Aster yellows", a native disease which devastated entire crops of garlic in Minnesota in 2012 due in large part to our extraordinarily mild winter.

Garlic - Overview
If you live in an urban setting like I do, you are probably only exposed to one or two kinds of garlic carried at local grocery stores or farmers markets. However, there are said to be over 600 cultivated sub-varieties of garlic in the world which all differ in size, color, shape, taste, number of cloves per bulb, pungency, and stability. Check out Gourmet Garlic Gardens for a large listing of garlic varieties and other info about garlic.

In addition to only being exposed to limited varieties of garlic, you're probably only used to eating garlic bulbs, when in fact the leaves and flowers are also edible. Immature flower stalks (scapes) can also be eaten and are sometimes marketed for uses similar to asparagus in stir-fries. Immature plants resemble scallions before the bulb forms and can also be eaten.

Garlic - Culinary
When recipes call for garlic, it's usually listed in the ingredients list as so many cloves of garlic. A clove is the individual segment. A head of garlic is the whole bulb.

Sometimes the recipe will tell you to use a garlic press, mince/smash/slice, or just toss it in. But why does it matter? Let's talk about the chemistry at play.

The aroma of fresh garlic is created when the enzyme alliinase changes the sulfur compound alliin into allicin. Alliinase and alliin are contained in separate garlic cells. They are released when the cells are broken (cutting,  mincing, smashing, etc). Allicin is the chemical compound that is primarily responsible for the "hot" sensation of raw garlic. The process of cooking garlic removes allicin, thus mellowing its spiciness.

With that in mind, I tend to use garlic as a spice to add flavor to my food. I don't like eating garlic for the sake of eating it. Thus, in order to maximize the garlic flavor, I recommend using a mortar and pestle (or go Hulk) to completely pulverize the cells and help the crucial chemical reaction between aliinase and alliin take place.

To flavor!
Jack