Aromatics

My husband Jim and I spent today at the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival in Saugerties, New York. The trip to Saugerties, according to the fastest route, was about an hour and a half. We decided to take a more scenic route, which made the trip an hour or so longer. That long road trip, coupled with the overwhelmingly heady sensation of sampling about a dozen different varieties of garlic, created a day trip that I will long remember.

I like to think of garlic as an aromatic. It, like onions, is a member of the allium family. This group of plants also includes shallots and leeks. My style of cooking often involves these flavorful vegetables as a base. Fairly typically, I will heat oil, chop up a couple of cloves of garlic and/or some onion and fry it in the hot oil until the air around the cooking pan is fragrant. Then, it is time to add the main element of the dish: whatever meat or vegetable or grain will comprise the key ingredient.

Garlic, as a result, is an important but perhaps under-recognized element of each daily meal. It was a treat, as a result, to spend a few hours hobnobbing with aficionados and to get a sense of what can happen when this base ingredient moves out of the sidelines and takes center stage.

Our entry into the garlic festival began with a stop at the first booth, manned by a garlic entrepreneur known as Jake. The booth, like many others, featured wooden boxes of both loose and bagged bulbs of garlic in several varieties, and small dishes set out in front. In the small dishes were bits of raw, fresh garlic diced into pieces that we perhaps a quarter-inch in diameter. Next to the dishes were toothpicks. Visitors were encouraged to select a toothpick, pierce one of the diced bits, and pop it into the mouth.

My first taste was of a fairly mellow German white variety. It was fresh and sharp. I felt both the freshness and sharpness penetrate my tastebuds, waking them up. In the meantime, my husband was sampling a different variety: a hard neck variety of garlic known as Georgian Fire. "You've got to try this, hun," he exclaimed. "I pierced one of the pieces and felt the fire slip down the back of my throat."

"Wow," I exclaimed.

From Georgian Fire, we moved to sampling what are known as soft-necks: a Chamiskuri variety that came from one of the former Soviet Republics and the famous (or infamous) Elephant Garlic, which is known for its large cloves and its mild flavors.

From each, along with several other types of hard neck garlics, came the sharp freshness over and over again.

To return to an unanswered matter, the difference between a hard necked garlic and a soft necked one has to do in part with the stem. Garlic grows from a clove planted about four inches deep into the ground. From the clove sprouts a green shoot that eventually stretches upward about four feet and thickens and dries into a stalk. If the stalk is firm like a small stick, the variety is a hard-neck. If the stalk is soft and pliable like a piece of twine, you've got a soft neck. Hard necks also produce a scape, which is a long green stem, just as the bulb growing from the clove underneath the ground begins to mature. Growers learn quickly to cut off the scapes -- partly to promote the bulb's growth and partly because the scapes are a delectable savory treat in and of themselves.

Most of the local farmers in our part of New York grow primarily hard neck garlics because soft necks are more vulnerable to cold. However, even if the soft necks are vulnerable, they tend to store better, retaining their aromatic headiness up to a year after their harvest. We wanted to give these soft necks a try, and a consultant with the Garlic Seed Foundation encouraged us to give it a try. A little bit of extra mulch would help protect it through the winter as long as we remembered to start pulling off those layers of mulch once the snow melted in April.

We left the garlic festival with a pound of the Chamiskuri soft necks, a pound of Elephant cloves, and a pound of the peppery Georgian Fire that had first kicked our taste buds alive. We also left feeling the heat of the late September sun baking through our skin and the sharp hot fragrances of the miniature pieces of garlic that we had sampled warming our stomachs.

I rarely eat garlic raw. Like most people, I see it as something that requires roasting, frying, or baking in some form or fashion. I also see it as an enhancement to dishes, not a singular ingredient. But eating it raw and by itself opened up an amazing discovery. Garlic, by itself, smells and tastes good. It is powerful in its strength and its freshness. What I had sampled had awakened my taste buds and kindled my appetite. It had cleansed my palate and made me eager for more.