In Pursuit of Garlic (13 page)

But I do have a garlic-chopping friend that works better than my knife: the enigmatically named ulu. The Inuit made curved ulus in all sizes for removing seal skins and carving the meat, and I bet they never thought they’d see them used for chopping garlic. My ulu was given to me one Christmas by my daughter-in-law Chrissy, who loves garlic as much as I do. It’s a simple 8-inch (20-centimeter) wood square (mine has inlaid strips of dark and light wood), with a round depression taking up most of the center; the half-moon blade is set in a wooden handle. The knife exactly fits the depression and makes mincemeat of the garlic in no time. It’s the best garlic chopper I’ve ever used, and it also chops herbs beautifully. But remembering Lucy and her garlic-scented food processor, I scrub mine out frequently. I treat it to a good rub with vegetable oil about once a month, and I run a sharpening stone over the blade whenever it seems to need it.

Garlic keepers with (necessary) ventilation holes in the lid look neat on a shelf in the kitchen, but you don’t really need them. Unglazed pots are better than glazed ones, but any container will do as long as the garlic is kept dry and ventilated. I store my garlic in an open bowl on a shelf above my spices. What looks more inviting than a garlic braid or rope hanging from the pot rack? Or a mesh vegetable bin filled with cloves? But don’t expect to store a lot of garlic this way—in the warmth of your kitchen it will soon dry out. Keep only a month or two’s worth of garlic on display.

Unglazed terra-cotta garlic roasters with domed lids are another nonessential garlic accessory, but they beat aluminum foil packages on a couple of counts. First, they roast the garlic bulbs or cloves at an even temperature and it’s easier to scrape juices from their glazed bottoms than it is to struggle with a piece of crumpled super-hot foil. Second, they’re much prettier. I prefer my roaster—which holds one large clove or two small ones.

This isn’t the same as storing garlic in a cool place for as far into the winter as your varieties will keep. This is about being creative with drying and freezing or otherwise preserving your precious garlic crop, or the mountain of bulbs you bought at a garlic fair, so that you can keep it past its best-before date.

“But why would you bother?” says Lucy, and she has a point if you live in a city with greengrocers who care enough to buy good garlic from Mexico or Argentina once our domestic product is used up for the season. They might also buy from companies like Gilroy’s Christopher Ranch that store their crop in climate-controlled warehouses to keep it fresh almost all year. But if you don’t live in a more enlightened community, by the time January rolls around you’ll have to settle for small supermarket garlic bulbs so old and badly stored they’re either sprouting or turning to dust. That’s when your very own preserved garlic is useful.

No one is indifferent to garlic. People either love it or hate
it, and most good cooks
seem to belong in the first group.

FAYE LEVY, food writer and cookbook author

WE HAVE a dry period from midwinter until the local new crop is ready, usually mid-August. Luckily I’ve been able to buy some pretty nice Purple Stripes from Argentina, where the seasons are nearly opposite to ours, so its garlic is ready when ours is done. But in the interests of research I’ve experimented with a few methods of preserving garlic, and I like freezing the best. Recently I thawed a few cloves that had spent a whole year in our deep freezer, which is colder than the freezer compartment of the fridge, and they were still strong and fresh. Like all frozen vegetables, they were a little translucent once thawed, but they retained a respectable amount of firm flesh.

There are several ways to freeze garlic, all of them dead easy. One is to immerse peeled whole or chopped cloves in water-filled ice cube trays and then put the frozen cubes in freezer bags. I put one whole clove or a teaspoon (5 mL) of chopped garlic in each tray section. I’ve thawed and roasted the whole cloves or dropped a whole cube into a soup I’m going to purée. The chopped garlic, thawed, works better for sautéing or in a stew or a regular soup where you don’t want the presence of whole cloves. For sautéing, thaw the cubes of chopped garlic in a small dish and don’t throw out the water—it’s redolent of garlic and is a terrific addition to gravy or sauces.

Or you can purée garlic with oil and freeze it in small containers; use a ratio of about two parts oil to one of garlic. Because the oil doesn’t completely freeze, you can spoon out what you need directly from the freezer. If you take the container out and it thaws and stays at room temperature for a length of time, don’t use it (see the sidebar “When Garlic Turns Deadly”).

The easiest way to freeze loose whole cloves is to leave the skin on and freeze them on a cookie sheet; then transfer them to containers. The next-easiest way is to peel them first. In my experience, both methods result in a softer, almost mushy texture compared with garlic frozen in water. But I suppose it hardly matters when you’re going to be cooking them until they’re soft.

Thawed garlic isn’t so great as a substitute for raw garlic used as a garnish, though it works just fine in vinaigrette. So does a tablespoon (15 mL) of the garlic water.

Garlic is my desert island vegetable.

MICHAEL SMITH, cookbook author and Food Network host

DRYING GARLIC requires more attention and to my mind is less satisfactory than freezing, but if you have a lot of garlic and no deep freezer, it’s the way to go. I’ve tried different methods—in the vegetable-and-fruit dehydrator that takes up space in my basement because I use it about every three years, in the microwave, and in the oven—and all kept the garlic well for several months. To start my experiment, I removed the skin from twenty cloves and sliced them about an eighth of an inch (0.4 centimeters) thick; that took nearly an hour and was the hardest part.

The dehydrator had no specific instructions for garlic, so I followed the general ones for potatoes, figuring garlic had about the same density and moisture content. I left the slices carefully laid out in the dehydrator for an hour at 97°F (36°C), then turned it up to 115°F (46°C) because I realized some summers are nearly that hot and it might take forever. After ten more hours they looked toasty and were brittle. After a month in a jar they’d softened a little but stayed strong, fragrant, and tasty until they were used by June of the following year.

IT’S DIFFICULT to get an ordinary electric oven down to just over 100°F (38°C), so I tried a couple of ways. First I heated the oven to 200°F (93°C)—the lowest mine will go—and left the slices in for seven minutes; then I turned off the oven and let the slices sit in it for a half-hour. I had toast-colored, very dry slices that looked brittle, but ten months later they still smelled strongly of garlic and reconstituted with good, if toasty, flavor. I let another batch sit an hour and fifteen minutes on a heated cast-iron pan in an oven preheated to 200°F (93°C) and then turned off before the garlic cloves went in, with the oven light left on to hold some heat. I liked them best at first—they were almost white and seemed properly dried, but although they retained their texture the flavor disappeared in about five months. A magazine article advised drying garlic cut in half at 140°F (60°C) for two hours and then lowering the temperature to 130°F (54°C) until the garlic pieces were totally dry and crisp. That seemed too much for the little guys, so I didn’t try it; later I read that commercially processed garlic is dried at 122 to 140°F (50 to 60°C). Only above that temperature do flavors start to break down.

The microwave, with the garlic zapped for a minute at a time at high until the garlic was crisp, seemed the most successful drying method in the beginning. The slices were pearly white and full flavored, but they smelled like peanuts after about five months and had severely diminished flavor.

So you can see there’s no hard-and-fast rule for drying garlic successfully. My most successful batch—if length of storage is a measure—was the first one (seven minutes with the heat on and half an hour in a turned-off oven). But all the garlic except the microwaved slices kept its goodness and flavor for as long as anyone might need.

The message is that you’re on your own. Successful drying is a matter of experimentation, and results probably depend on the moisture content of the garlic and its variety, as well as how thin the slices are.

Garlic vinegar is another way to save the garlic from your garden for future use, but I don’t think it’s an effective option for preserving a lot of garlic—how much vinegar do you need in a year, anyway? Still, made with garlic from your own garden and put up in good-looking bottles with handmade labels, it’s a great gift. Use wine vinegar, white or red, and drop in as many smashed or chopped cloves as you like. Add a sprig of rosemary or thyme and some peppercorns for appearance and extra taste, and you have an original dinner party gift.

Garlic powder was the first garlic I cooked with because I knew nothing else, and it still has a place on my shelf. I think this shocked Lucy when I mentioned it. “I never use it,” she said. “It’s got a funny taste.”

I agree it can’t compare with fresh garlic, and sometimes it smells tinny to me in the package, but I find it useful. It’s better than fresh chopped garlic for sprinkling over croutons made with day-old French bread, for example, or on the stale tortillas I cut into triangles and toast in the oven (my mother was a Depression-era cook and brought me up to be frugal) because it clings to the pieces and doesn’t drop to the bottom of the bowl or storage bag, as pieces of chopped garlic do. Sometimes I add garlic powder to the gravy at the last minute when I have no time to chop some fresh.

Some beneficial attributes of fresh garlic are lost during the processing of garlic powder, but products vary and we have no way of knowing which are better. Some garlic powders bloom with that familiar garlic aroma when they meet a liquid, and I can only assume that some allicin is being produced. But because garlic is cut into pieces to help along the drying, some of the allicin has to be lost (the same is true of your home-dried garlic; the allicin retained in frozen garlic is a big question mark). And although garlic powder has a definite garlic taste—most of it is about two and a half times as potent as fresh garlic—it doesn’t have the nuanced flavor of fresh garlic, perhaps because processing produces some sulfur compounds that don’t exist in fresh garlic.

Peeled garlic cloves that come in a jar or plastic bag are a recent innovation that look like the best invention since the garlic press, but I’m from Missouri. Can life really be this easy? How can they possibly stay fresh and tasty for however long it takes them to get from there to here without going moldy? What are they steeped in anyway? I bought some to find out. I chopped a clove on my ulu, and it had no smell or taste—well, okay, it had a
little
smell and taste. Then I chopped a fresh clove of garlic, and the difference came home. The processed cloves have a certain appeal, no doubt, but they’ve been so blanched and acidified to stay fresh and looking good that they’re nearly useless. Their flavor is compromised, as well as their therapeutic benefits.

Let’s face it: all methods of processing garlic so that it fits into jars or packages are going to deplete some of its goodness. Garlic powder or dehydrated garlic (used mainly in health supplements and convenience foods) or peeled or chopped garlic in jars is convenient, but it isn’t the same as fresh garlic. It doesn’t taste the same and doesn’t have the same nutritional or therapeutic value, and we shouldn’t kid ourselves that it does. But if it’s what you need at the time, use it.

Garlic is a hot commodity. Sometimes I fear it’s in danger of becoming so trendy it will turn into tomorrow’s oat bran. I believe the basic garlic bulb will endure for another ten thousand years or more because of its value as a flavoring and its health benefits; it’s the fancy garlic parts that may be passing fancies.

Take garlic scapes, the flower stalks of hardneck varieties of garlic, which are usually removed sometime in June, before their lovely curling shape straightens. A few years ago no one had heard of scapes, but now they’re considered a rare delicacy and sell for high prices—in the summer of 2011 they were priced at a quarter each or five for a dollar at the Friday farmers’ market near my house. Can you imagine green beans selling individually? Five summers ago that same farmer would have thrown those scapes onto the compost heap. But they’ve caught the fancy of food editors everywhere, and every spring newspapers and magazines run the latest methods for cooking them, and websites and blogs rave about the virtues and plate appeal of this latest trendy vegetable. Restaurants love scapes—they’re different, they look good, and they signal that this establishment is on top of the food trends.

Perhaps I’m being churlish, but I think there’s a whiff of the emperor’s new clothes in the scape’s status as a delicacy. It makes an interesting, mildly garlicky dip when chopped finely and combined with sour cream or thick Greek yogurt, and it’s okay but a bit tough chopped into lengths and simmered in olive oil. But scapes don’t taste even a bit like asparagus to me, despite all the blogs I’ve read. I admit that they taste better—and don’t seem as tough—quickly parboiled and then bathed in olive oil and grilled on the barbecue, which adds flavor of its own. But I don’t think garlic-scape pesto compares with the real thing, the one made with basil and lots of garlic and pine nuts, though Lucy says I should add grated lemon rind and some bread crumbs to enhance the flavor and texture. I’ll try that next year.

Like many cooks, I didn’t know what to do with the pointy ends of the scapes—the immature flower bud ends. Were they edible? Should I cut them off? But they are the most attractive part of the scape, so I left them on. Actually, they had more taste than the rest of the stalk, but they were tougher, and the rough, sort of crumbly texture wasn’t exactly pleasant. The next time I cut them off, chopped them up finely, and sprinkled them over the sautéed stems. That was better.