It is winter her now, my garlic is tucked under a blanket of snow. Garlic – particularly the hardneck varieties that I grow here in Ontario, Canada grows like tulips. You plant them in the fall, they grow up through the frost and flower in the early summer and mature as the summer rolls on. And while perhaps not a universally appreciated for their beauty as tulips, garlic is here to play a strong supporting role in your cooking. But, did you know not all garlic tastes the same? I talk, a lot, perhaps a little too much, about garlic when I am selling at the farmers’ market and a lot of people are surprised when I talk about different flavours. “Doesn’t garlic all just taste like garlic?” “I didn’t know there was so much flavour variety!” I have garlic that is hot and clears your mind, and nasal passages. I have garlic with complex flavours that are soft and savoury. I have garlic that is deep and earthy and reminds you of a delicious beef stew.
Today, I will talk about garlic in one of the most loved garlic family in Ontario, and throughout Canada – garlic in the porcelain family. Porcelain garlic is loved across Canada because it grows beautifully in hot summers and cold winters, in fact, it needs a cold winter to encourage the plant to break the garlic apart into separate cloves. Did you know that the same plant can have a different number of cloves depending on how cold the winter was? I have grown garlic from southern Ontario (zone 6) that had 6 or 7 cloves in each head, and when I grew it here (right on the border of zones 4 and 5) it averaged 4 cloves a head! Favourite porcelains include Music, Susan Delenfield, Northen Quebec, Rosewood, and Yugoslavian (the last is my favourite). They have big cloves, and not too many cloves per head which is great for those cooks who hate peeling garlic and fiddling with lots of cloves. The flavour is bold: hot and garlicky, often without a lot of subtle additional flavours although I do say Yugoslavian has a hint of spice. Maybe that one can be the pumpkin spice garlic of the family! They tend to have sweet undertones that come out when cooked. They are versatile and delicious raw, baked, sauteed, roasted, and pickled.
Porcelains are easy to grow, and easy to cure. They keep well and I usually still have healthy cloves come spring. That is another feature that makes them well loved! They are not shrinking, or growing, on your counter in November. They stay hard and beautiful throughout the winter months, ready to grace your cooking.