In Pursuit of Garlic (12 page)

THE WINNERS of the garlic art contest, judged early this morning, are on display in a room on the other side of Rue du Mercadial, only a few steps away. But to get there we have to squeeze past a platoon of school majorettes twirling batons to a brass band and pick our way through a crowd that’s gathered to watch the
manouille
contest. Tying a
manouille
for market is considered an art in France: the garlic stem is cut back to about 8 inches (20 centimeters), the roots are trimmed off, and the outer layers of skin are carefully removed until the glossy pink inner skin is exposed. Then the stems are wrapped and tied tightly together, stalk by stalk. It’s the best way to package Lautrec’s pink garlic because its stalks are rigid once the plants are cured. In the festival contest six growers take turns tying a giant
manouille
on long tables joined together under the loggia where we ate our bowls of soup only a couple of hours ago; the goal is to beat last year’s record in a three-hour limit, but not by too much. This group is moving fast.

“If it gets too long it will be hard to beat the record the next year,” says Pauline. “The aim is to progress regularly so it stays competitive.”

The cook who can employ [garlic] successfully
will be found to possess the delicacy of perception,
the accuracy of judgment, and the dexterity of hand which
go to the formation of a great artist.

MRS. W.G. WATERS, author of
The Cook’s Decameron: A Study in Taste (1901)

THE WINNING garlic sculpture is a 3-foot (1-meter) hot-air balloon made of overlapping translucent garlic skins floating over a garlic foliage landscape. Watching the balloon from below are garlic-bulb people wearing clogs carved from garlic cloves standing on a pathway made of chopped-garlic gravel edged with garlic-clove stones. Other entrants include an Eiffel Tower of garlic bulbs, and a life-size store mannequin dressed in a frothy gown of garlic skins. My favorite is the proud garlic rooster: he rises tall on realistic feet made of tiny garlic bulbils; his tail is a graceful sweep of garlic scapes; his comb and wattle shake their purple garlic skins. He stands regally displaying second prize, although in my mind he should have won first.

The rooster triggered thoughts of chicken in my subconscious, and I’m suddenly peckish. “Me too,” says Chris, and we set out on a search for food. We look in vain for a food stall, because the booths in the marketplace are selling hats and jewelry, pottery, soaps, and rainbow-colored macaroons. A man is demonstrating a whiz of a garlic cutter, and I buy one. Eventually I see a man stirring a cauldron of a creamy white mixture. More soup?
Aligot,
says his sign.

“What is that?” I ask Pauline.

“
Aligot
is a specialty at festivals around here,” she says. “It’s mashed potatoes stirred and stirred with lots of fresh cheese till it gets really smooth. You buy a plastic plate of it and eat it with a spoon, or you get a container and take it home for dinner.”

“May I have some?” I ask the man.

“
Non, non,
it’s not ready yet,” he says, stirring the mixture around and around, lifting it high into the air and then stirring more. When we return in half an hour it’s smooth and elastic, ready for eating. Chris and I dip into a plateful.

“It needs garlic,” I say.

“Je regrette,”
says the man. “I have none.”

We remedy that easily enough—we return to the man demonstrating the garlic cutter, get a nice rounded spoonful of freshly chopped garlic, and stir it into our
aligot.
Now it’s perfect, smooth and cheesy with a good hit of garlic, a concentrated purée of flavors. It holds us over until the
fabounade,
scheduled for seven-thirty in the
boulodrome
just outside the village walls, the grand finale of the day.

While we’re changing for the event and having a glass of wine from Gaillac in our room, I eye the
manouille
I purchased at the shop yesterday, sitting on the mantel. Should I try to smuggle it home, or should I cut into a clove and sample it now, in case I get caught and thrown in jail and never get to taste it? I’m almost afraid to—what if I’m disappointed? But the garlic wins. I came here to find Ail Rose, and now that it’s within my reach I have to see if it lives up to its billing.

I remove a clove, use my travel corkscrew to take off the skin, and bite down hard.

The garlic hits my wine-soaked tongue sharply but mellows out almost immediately. It’s—different. Garlicky, naturally, but not strongly sulfurous. Sort of musky. The taste reaches a plateau and lingers beautifully.

I sigh with relief. It’s good. But the flesh is creamy white, like that of every other garlic in the world. Was I really hoping it would be pink, like the skin? And what subgroup does Ail Rose belong to? To the French it’s simply the best garlic in the world, and its subgroup is irrelevant. Just by looking at it I know it’s not from the Artichoke subgroup, like Gilroy’s ‘California Early’ with its many layers of bulging cloves and irregular shape. Ail Rose is compact and almost round, with each clove nearly identical in size and shape. It’s perfect, as Madame Barthe says.

It’s not until I get home and find a grower in the southern United States who lists ‘Rose de Lautrec’ on his website that I discover it’s probably a Creole and originated in Spain. Perhaps that’s where that mysterious medieval traveler came from with his precious garlic in his pocket, since Spain isn’t far from this region of France. It’s a fanciful story, but there may be some truth to it after all. Creoles are among the rarest of garlics and are sometimes difficult to find, and they’re good to eat fresh because of their sweet, mellow flavor combined with heat. They’re also known to last a long time, sometimes as long as the next year’s harvest, in the right storage conditions.

As to whether I smuggled home the rest of the
manouille,
my lips are sealed.

A garlic caress is stimulating. A garlic excess soporific.

MAURICE EDMOND SAILLAND, aka Curnonsky

THE
FABOUNADE
is fabulous, even if we can’t speak more than a few words to our fellow diners. I guess we look French enough because several people sit down beside us and try to strike up conversations. But they give up after
“Bonsoir”
or
“Joli soir”
and move off to find another location.

The thirteen hundred of us—moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, and kids of all ages—sit on benches at long paper-covered tables. We sip local wine as a band from a nearby village travels around the tables playing universal favorites like “When the Saints Come Marching In.” People clap and sing as we wait for the
confréries
to march in and dinner to begin.

In due time they arrive, moving slowly to their theme song. Then the
grande manouille
is carried in on planks held aloft by a dozen men and women. It’s nearly 74 feet (22.5 meters), the longest in the festival’s history and about 6@ inches (17 centimeters) longer than last year’s. Now I realize why it can’t get too much longer each year—the men and women of the garlic brotherhood wouldn’t be able to carry it in.

Dinner, served by volunteers, is melon and ham followed by cassoulet topped with duck leg confit. It’s a homey dish, the duck a bit overcooked and the white beans nicely soft and soupy. But as with the
aligot,
there isn’t enough garlic. In fact, I don’t think there’s any. I have to remember we’re in France, not Italy, and although the French like garlic, they never use it as liberally as Italians or even many North Americans, and sometimes not at all if they deem it unnecessary. Dessert is a square of lemon tart cut from a large bakery-made sheet. As Jacqueline Barthe would say,
comme ci, comme ça.

As soon as the band strikes up after dinner, masses of people get up to dance. Women dance with women, children with children. And the men dance—they steer their partners expertly around the floor doing little box steps or waltzes, and they look happy about it.

But after a while we have nothing left to say to each other as well as no one else to talk to. It’s time to leave. On the short walk back to our lodgings, I think about the evening. The menu wasn’t the same, but the home-style meal reminded me of the turkey suppers held in Ontario villages and towns in the fall, the fried chicken fetes I’ve heard about in the southern states, or the summer lobster feasts and fish fries on the East Coast. But there was a difference: the French dinner had more joie de vivre. The French have their conservative, rule-following side, but then they totally abandon themselves to the enjoyment of food and wine and just being together in the moment. We could learn something from them.

The Canadian garlic festivals I’ve been to are informative, even educational, with lectures and demonstrations; unlike Gilroy and Lautrec, they offer many varieties of garlic to buy for planting or storing. The Canadian festivals are earnest and sincere and practical. Like Canadians? Gilroy’s festival is pure Hollywood, but the organizers know how to run a big professional operation that’s both slick and friendly, and the festival has made millions for local charitable organizations. The Fête de l’Ail Rose—well, it’s French. It has innate style and class, plus a historical setting no place in North America can possibly match. Yet it’s honest and down to earth; garlic is celebrated, but it stays suitably in the background. It’s like a medieval fair without the bearbaiting and cockfighting.

I wonder what garlic festivals are like in Romania, where my little vegetable earned its reputation as a mighty vampire killer, or in Tajikistan, where it was first domesticated.

· TURNING HOURS INTO DOLLARS ·

The nonprofit Gilroy Garlic Festival does more than promote garlic: it raises money for local charities through general admission, Gourmet Alley foods, and booth rentals. More than $8 million has been raised since 1979. In addition, each person volunteering at the festival “earns” a theoretical wage based on hours worked, which is then donated to the charity of the volunteer’s choice. In recent years this has ranged from $85.35 given to a wildlife education center to more than $10,000 to Gilroy High School’s choir.

· WHERE GARLIC GROWS ·

In 2008, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations came up with a list of the top ten garlic producers in the world. Figures are in tonnes.

China 12,088,000

India 645,000

South Korea 325,000

Egypt 258,608

Russia 254,000

United States 221,810

Spain 142,400

Argentina 140,000

Myanmar 128,000

Ukraine 125,000

· WHAT’S IN A LABEL? ·

Pink garlic was grown informally around Lautrec until 1959, when several young producers formed the Syndicat de Défense du Label Ail Rose de Lautrec to improve growing and marketing practices. In 1966 the garlic was awarded the Label Rouge, which officially identifies quality and is an award of prestige in France. About 185 growers and three packaging houses are now part of the Syndicat de Défense du Label Rouge et de l’IGP Ail Rose de Lautrec, growing garlic in the southwestern department of Tarn. Yield hovers between 660 and 770 tons (600 to 700 tonnes) annually.

In 1996 pink garlic received an IGP, the Indication Géographique Protégée, a European label that certifies that agricultural products have been grown in a specified area in the framework of IGP-PGI rules and have been checked by the awarding body.

· SMALL BUT MIGHTY ·

The one-day Fête de l’Ail Rose de Lautrec began in 1970 and always takes place the first Friday in August. It attracts close to ten thousand people, though arriving at that figure is an inexact science, because admission is not charged. The organizers do informal head counts in the square a couple of times during the day, especially when the garlic soup is being served and the biggest crowd is in attendance.

Sixty or seventy volunteers are involved, and the expense budget is about £25,000. Promoting pink garlic and Lautrec is the festival’s main goal, but each year it donates about £400 to a charitable association, usually for disabled children.

Oh, holy to the nose are the incense and sizzle that summonfolks from all parts of the houseto ask about dinner, sniffing...

DAVID YOUNG,
“Chopping Garlic”

I noticed a
long time ago that it wasn’t until a clove was squashed in my garlic press that its unique fragrance suddenly bloomed and trumpets blared. I’m ashamed to say I never wondered why until a handful of years ago. Then I discovered that allicin, which gives garlic its unique taste and aroma—as well as most of its medicinal value—is created only when alliin (a sulfur compound known as S-allyl cysteine sulfoxide) and alliinase (an enzyme), which are contained in separate compartments inside the clove, come together. When a clove of garlic is cut or smashed, the two elements are released, producing allyl sulfenic acid, which immediately changes into allicin, chemically known as diallyl thiosulfate. It’s a complicated chemical reaction, and it all happens in ten seconds.

More chemical reactions follow, releasing other compounds that contribute to garlic’s taste as well as its therapeutic value. It’s fascinating to realize that a mere smash of your knife can start a cascade of chemical interactions. This simple plant, which has been a kitchen staple for thousands of years, has become so important medicinally that scientists are studying it. We use garlic as often as onions and salt, but that doesn’t mean we understand why it tastes the way it does or, more important, how the ways we prepare and cook it affect both its flavor and its benefits.

Raw garlic smashed and chopped finely or put through a press and used right away has, as experienced cooks know, the strongest taste. No, I’m wrong—a whole clove crushed by your very own teeth in your very own mouth has the strongest taste and the most therapeutic value, though not many people like their garlic that way.

The best way to get the ultimate flavor and greatest health benefits from garlic is to eat it raw or exposed to heat for as little time as possible. Raw garlic is a desirable taste in many sauces, spreads, and salads, such as aioli, chimichurri, pesto, tapenade, hummus, and tabbouleh, as well as cold soups like gazpacho and garlic-almond soup. Most of these dishes, you may notice, originated in warmer regions, such as the Mediterranean, South America, Spain, and the Middle East, where garlic was used as a preservative as well as a flavoring because of its antibacterial qualities—not, as many believe, because its strong taste disguised rotting food.

Some cooked dishes also benefit from a hit of raw garlic, like the easy pasta I sometimes make just for myself when Chris is off enjoying the company of his football buddies. It’s a simple concoction of leftover cooked linguine stirred with chicken stock, heavy cream, some grated lemon rind, and Parmesan cheese, with a chopped garlic clove tossed in just as the sauce thickens. Now that I know more about how garlic breaks down into that healthful allicin, I chop the garlic clove and let it sit for a few seconds, then remove the pan from the flame, let it cool a bit, and toss in the garlic. Even short contact with a bubbling hot sauce can kill the allicin. Along with a couple of grindings of black pepper, the garlic adds just the right kick to what could otherwise be an ordinary pasta dish. A soup or stew that’s been cooked with a few spoonfuls of chopped garlic will have a more vivid flavor and therapeutic value if you drop in a little chopped raw garlic just before serving it or top each serving with a few bits. I like a little extra raw garlic on a nice big steak, too, even if it’s been rubbed with garlic before cooking.

Garlic can taste almost any way you want it to,
depending on how you treat it.

LUCY WAVERMAN, food editor and cookbook author

Now that I buy and grow different cultivars and have a variety of garlic to choose from, I’ve learned to taste a bit of the one I’m going to use raw before tossing it in. Some varieties are hotter than others, and it is a good idea to make a few tasting notes as you experiment so you’ll remember, say, that ‘German Red’ was just fine as a garnish on the goulash but that ‘Susan Delafield’ needs taming and is better roasted, unless you have a cast-iron tongue. In general, Creoles and Rocamboles—everyone’s favorite garlic—have a sweeter, less hot flavor than Porcelains and Silverskins. But there are exceptions among the cultivars; see “A Garlic Primer” for some guidelines.

RAW GARLIC is the perfect match for some foods, but other recipes, like the classic French chicken with forty cloves of garlic, require the mellow taste of whole cooked garlic cloves—and hang the therapeutic content. Garlic roasted as whole cloves to go with the Sunday roast contains no allicin or other sulfur compounds whatsoever. It’s mellowed out, and many varieties that sting your mouth when raw lie down in lovely submission when cooked. This isn’t a bad thing—there’s nothing tastier than roasted garlic with the top cut off and olive oil poured over the exposed cloves. It’s great smeared on a steak. Or blended into a wine sauce. Or mixed with olive oil and parsley and spread on toasted ciabatta. Roasted garlic may not have the health benefits of raw garlic, but who knows what other medicinal elements this amazing bulb produces when it’s cooked?

Garlic that’s crushed and chopped in even the most allicin-preserving way and then overbrowned in the sauté pan suffers the worst fate of all. Not only has the allicin been destroyed by the heat, the guts are fried out of the garlic taste, leaving it acrid and useless. Garlic should be gently sautéed till it’s faintly tan and fragrant, and although that may not preserve the allicin, some of the other sulfur compounds will remain and the flavor will be developed, not ruined. Many recipes begin with onions being lightly browned in butter or oil, with garlic added as the onions properly color. I try to add the garlic at just the right moment so that both it and the onions develop their sweetness but aren’t ruined by too much browning. It’s a fine line.

Acids such as vinegar and lemon or lime juice also destroy allicin and much of garlic’s taste. Remember this when you push a clove of garlic through your press directly into the vinegar in your vinaigrette. Push it into a bowl instead, or chop it on a board, and give it ten seconds to complete its magical transformation before adding it to an acid ingredient. Some of its compounds will be destroyed by the acid, but some will remain.

Chopping garlic is how I start dinner. It puts me in the mood for cooking and signals that the relaxed part of the day is nigh. Even the cats know it’s time to meow for supper once they hear the knife and sniff that pungent smell. The smell of garlic makes everyone smile.

There’s no special art to chopping garlic, but you have to do it a few times to get the hang of it. The first step, after freeing a clove from the bulb, is to get its tight little jacket off, the hardest part. You need strong fingers to squash the clove between thumb and forefinger to loosen the skin, but I’ve seen a few manly cooks do it. I used to cut the end off the clove and laboriously peel the skin off with my fingernails, a real drag with small cloves, but after seeing it in a movie a dozen years ago I adopted the knife smack common to today’s TV chefs. This technique not only is more efficient but also makes you look like a pro: lay the clove on a board, place the flat of a chef’s knife blade on top of it, and whack the knife with the heel of your hand. It’s a bit messy, with skin scattering over the board like big dandruff flakes and the garlic lying in pieces, but it’s the quickest way, and you can add variations to your whack. A light one provides a slightly flattened clove that might be just right for flavoring a Caesar dressing or some oil that needs just a faint garlic taste; a more murderous whack will squash the garlic like a fly and render it less in need of severe chopping.

If time isn’t a problem, try soaking the cloves in a bowl of water for a couple of hours. The skin will pull off easily, leaving the cloves intact and perfect for sautéing or roasting (or for making chicken with forty cloves of garlic), and there will be no need for messy peeling at the table. The softneck varieties, which have tighter skins, require a good soak, after which you have to get your fingernail under one end of the clove to release the skin, but then it peels off nicely. Rocamboles and other hardneck types usually give up their coverings more easily.

There’s another way to get the skin off: use one of those rubber squares sold to help unscrew tight lids. Fold the cloves in the rubber, press down, and roll back and forth. Voilà: skinned garlic. You can also buy a garlic roller-peeler some smart marketing person came up with to solve the problem. It’s made of the same type of textured rubber and looks like a giant manicotti tube. It’s well worth the few bucks it costs at most kitchen supply stores.

Once the clove is freed of its tight little jacket, start chopping. How to chop may seem elementary, my dear reader, but practice will make your technique look good and result in uniform pieces of garlic. Hold the handle of the knife with one hand and lay the palm of the other hand over the end of the blade, then rock the knife over the garlic. Move the handle end of the knife slightly as you cut to trace a quarter-circle shape on the board and cover all the garlic. The more you rock and move the knife back and forth, the finer the pieces will become. Scrape them up now and again and start over. It seems almost too obvious to mention, but finely minced garlic has more power and flavor than more coarsely chopped garlic.

“At Cordon Bleu they had us chop garlic with salt,” says Lucy Waverman, food columnist and cookbook author. “It makes the garlic creamier, and it doesn’t smell up the board as much. Once I chopped a lot of garlic in my food processor as a shortcut and then washed the bowl out and used it to make a dessert. Believe me, that was a big mistake.”

With wooden boards, too, you need to wash everything well afterward to make sure the taste is gone. You might keep a special board for chopping garlic, or if you use the salt method, mash it in a mortar with a pestle or in a small bowl with the back of a spoon. A food processor chops garlic well if other ingredients are going to be added to the bowl, but it’s useless for chopping a clove or two, because the garlic flies around and clings to the sides of the bowl and never reaches the texture you need.

Does a kitchen exist without a garlic press? It was the first “exotic” culinary gadget I bought, years ago, and it made me feel as if I’d graduated from Cooking 101. Trouble was, it was cheap aluminum—and you know how bendable aluminum can be. Before long it looked like a pretzel. The next one was also aluminum, but industrial strength, and plain as a garbage can. It didn’t even have a brand name, which most garlic presses seem to have these days.

That garlic press moved from house to house with me and lasted for at least thirty years. It did yeoman service until two springs ago, when Chris brought home a shiny new stainless steel one. It had no label, no identifying marks, a no-name press with no packaging. It was strong and beautiful, but by this time I’d graduated beyond the garlic press and was using a knife. And I felt pretty proud of myself for having advanced to this lofty plateau.

“I use my press only when I’m feeling incredibly lazy,” says Lucy. “And then I have to wash the darn thing, and it’s not easy getting those bits out. I control the texture of the garlic better when I chop it.”

Aye to all those points. Cleaning the press was what made me perfect my cutting technique. When I discovered the different ways garlic tasted and looked when I used a knife, I left the garlic press behind.

But some garlic presses elicit superlatives from users—especially the Zyliss Susi, which was made in Switzerland way back when and now is manufactured in China. It comes in two models, one that hinges backward and has little protruding bits that push out the garlic residue, and a bigger model that holds more than one clove (try pressing down on that with an arthritic wrist!) and has a nonstick interior. Paul Pospisil of the
Garlic News
raves about the ratcheting garlic press sold by Lee Valley Tools, which is said to crush up to four cloves of skin-on garlic at a time with a light squeeze of the handle. The removable screen and swing-out plate reportedly make it easy to clean, too.

SOME COOKS use a rasp to grate garlic. It sounds like a good idea if you want finely grated cloves. I’d be careful of my fingers, though—garlic cloves aren’t very big and they grate down quickly, which could add a spot or two of blood to the dinner. A friend recently introduced me to a neat stainless steel rasp she’d bought at a kitchen store. It’s a Microplane grater with a movable attachment that clamps over it with a knob on top and teeth underneath that hold the garlic (or ginger or nutmeg seed); you move it back and forth and the garlic is shredded finely. Garlic twisters, big at garlic fairs—where magicians demonstrate them and churn out bowls full of chopped garlic in seconds—are another option. I have two. Both are unnecessarily complicated, but one—the Nouveau Moulin à Ail, bought at the Fête de l’Ail Rose in Lautrec—turns out neat little squares of garlic without too much frustration. Chris likes it, but my knife is still faster.