Last year, Tim Jones created the perfect recipe for garlic butter, but as he searched for just the right ingredients, he discovered something many Americans still don't realize: Most of the garlic sold in supermarkets comes from China.
"That really disturbed me," he says, citing food-safety concerns.
So Jones planted his own - 130 gourmet bulbs last year, 400 this year - in his organic garden in Pleasantville, N.J. And he unabashedly reports that his garlic butter is the best around.
"Oh yeah, delicious," he says.
Now till Thanksgiving is garlic-planting time in our part of the world, and Jones is one of many home chefs and gardeners who realize there's a safer, better-tasting, and more interesting garlic out there in farmers markets and home gardens.
"It can be spicy, be strong but not hot, whatever you like," says Landon Jefferies, farm manager at Wyck, the historic house in Germantown. He mostly grows "German White" and what he calls "Keith's Rocambole," named for a farmer he used to work for in New York state.
At a sampling last weekend at Wyck, we spread Jefferies' roasted garlic cloves, like paste, on bread. They went down warm and full-bodied, with a fragrance so sweet, eyes all around the table closed in delight.
The consensus: amazing.
It tastes nothing like the supermarket stuff, which used to come from California. Over the last decade, however, the large-scale domestic garlic industry has been undercut by a super-cheap Chinese juggernaut.
Rather than grow their own, large U.S. operations now buy Chinese garlic offshore, import it through Mexican subsidiaries, and process it in their Central Valley plants, according to David Stern, a garlic farmer in Rose, N.Y., and director of the Garlic Seed Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization.
"The industry has imploded," he says.
Small-scale American farmers have seized the moment. They're marketing garlic like apples - as a regional, seasonal commodity - and playing to the public's hunger for sustainable and locally grown.
Like Dan Landis, who manages his family's organic Landisdale Farm in Lebanon County, they're growing more unusual and labor-intensive varieties that can cost $6 to $12 a pound, comprising five or six bulbs. And increasingly discriminating consumers are snapping it up.
Landis jumped into "niche garlic" six years ago after a customer asked for it.
"Back then, not as many people knew about it," he says, "but I realized it was a good fit."
Now he grows about two acres of the popular "German White," which sells for $3.75 a pound at Chestnut Hill, Clark Park, and Glenside farmers markets. "Sales are increasing every year," Landis says.
Virtually all the locally grown garlic is, like "German White," the hardneck type, which has a woody flower stalk, known as a scape or topset, that shoots out of the bulb. The bulb is easy to peel and has a single ring of four to eight large cloves.
Hardnecks are typically red, purple, purple-striped, or white, with triple the level of allicin that the softnecked supermarket garlic has. Released when the cloves are crushed, allicin gives garlic its famously pungent smell.
Softneck garlic, by comparison, doesn't produce a shoot and is usually white, with more and smaller cloves (12 to 20) and milder flavor. Compared to the hardnecks we tasted at Wyck, the softnecks were undistinguished.
"No comparison," said Steve Marino, who plans to plant some gourmet types in containers outside the West Logan rowhouse he shares with his wife, Ruth.
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