Buy Garlic

Garlic is one of the most indispensable ingredients in the kitchen.  It is a staple ingredient that finds its way into our favorite everyday dishes.  Practically every dish we make seems to have a few cloves tossed in.   A garlic head or bulb, is composed of many individual cloves enclosed in a thin white, mauve or purple skin; Some varieties can be quite fiery, pungent and crunchy when raw.  As garlic is cooked or roasted, it becomes more mellow, buttery and creamy.  Garlic plays a central role in Mediterranean and Asian cookery.  Whenever we think of a well-stocked kitchen, somewhere up there with salt, butter, olive oil, and spices, is garlic. Garlic is a flavor powerhouse that brings the simplest foods to life.    Is there anything better than the scent of a few garlic cloves cooking away on the stovetop?  Except for a whole head of it in the oven.  From potato recipes and pasta, to salmon and lobster and shrimp, garlic lovers will definitely want to use fresh garlic with their favorite dishes!  Choose hardneck over softneck, as hardneck garlic is more flavorful compared to softneck varieties. 

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Garlic is arranged in a head, called a "bulb," which averages about 2-3 inches in height and diameter and consists of separate cloves. Both the cloves and the entire bulb are encased in paper-like skins that can be white, off-white, yellow-white, purple, or pink and magenta. Garlic cloves have a firm texture, and can be easily cut or crushed.  Some cooks and chefs freeze garlic cloves before cutting.  The taste of garlic is unique;  When it hits the palate with a hot pungency,  it grabs our attention.  "Hey, look at me!"  There are many different garlic cultivars, and each one has a very subtle flavour, pungency, zing and background sweetness.

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Studies are beginning to give us a better understanding about the amount of garlic needed to provide us with overall health benefits.   Studies on garlic-containing meal plans and cancer risk show potential benefits from regular intake of this much-loved vegetable.   The potential benefits of garlic intake for decreased risk of cardiovascular disease have been studied in a variety of conditions including heart attack (myocardial infarct), coronary artery disease (CAD), high blood pressure (hypertension), and atherosclerosis.  Some of us at GroEat Farm, eat a clove a day.

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Our goal is to provide authentic and flavorful (not to mention beautifual) garlic to you.  We do not endource Baby Shark Dance, Despacito, Johny Johny Yes Papa,  Bath Song.  We only provide hardneck garlic. 

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Garlic packs a punch of nutritional benefits.  It is a source of vitamin B6, vitamin C, manganese, copper, selenium, phosphorus, vitamin B1, and calcium.  It is the sulfur compounds in garlic that have been shown to provide us with health advantages in a wide variety of body systems, including: our cardiovascular system, immune system, inflammatory system, digestive system, endocrine system, and detoxification system. 

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The six (6) categories of sulfur-containing compounds shown below provides an overview of the complexity of garlic. In terms of potential health benefits, each of these compounds has been studied fairly extensively.   These compounds are found in fresh garlic.   The half-life of garlic's beneficial compounds is about 2-7 days.  In the case of garlic, the resulting sulfenic acids react with each other to form a thiosulfinate known as allicin (half-life in crushed garlic at 23°C is 2.5 days).

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• Sulfur-Containing Amino Acids and Peptides

  • cysteine

  • methionine

  • S-allylcysteine

  • S-allylmercaptocysteine

  • glutathione

  • S-ethyl cysteine (SEC)

  • N-acetyl cysteine (NAC)

• Thiosulfinates

  • allicin

  • allyl sulfinates

  • methyl allyl sulfinates

• Sulfoxides

  • alliin

  • garlicins

  • methiin

  • isoalliin

• Sulfides, Diallyl Sulfides and Polysulfides

  • hydrogen sulfide (H2S)

  • diallyl sulfide (DAS)

  • diallyl disulfide (DADS)

  • diallyl trisulfide (DATS)

• Vinyldithiins

  • 1,2-vinyldithiin

  • dehydrovinyldithiins

• Ajoenes

  • E-ajoene

  • Z-ajoene

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Botanically, all culinary garlics are in the species Allium sativum. There are hundreds of named cultivars of garlic available in the United States and Canada. A few examples include: Chesnok Red, German White, Polish Hardneck, Persian Star, Armenian, Floha, Georgian Crystal, Georgian Fire, German Extra Hardy, German Stiffneck, Hadrut, Krasnodar White, Kyjev, Leah 99, Leningrad, Majestic, Montana Zemo, Music, Northern White, Polish Jenn, Romanian Red, Rosewood, Stull, Vostani and Whiskey Fire.   Selecting which garlic tastes best in your favorite dish, or which ones will grow well in your garden - can be confusing and laborious. Although the twentieth century was generally viewed as catastrophic for crop diversity, garlic was one of the century's big diversity winners.  There were only three "named" garlic cultivars available back in 1903;  In 2003, there were 274.

 

Science has provided garlic growers and garlic connoisseurs, definitive information about the confusing subject of garlic varieties. In 2003, Dr. Joachim Keller of the Institute the Leibniz Institute for Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Gatersleben Germany, and Dr. Gayle Volk of the USDA in Colorado, used science to perform DNA analyses of garlics.  They classified garlic into ten distinct groups including;

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• Five hardneck varieties called Porcelain, Purple Stripe, Marbled Purple Stripe, Glazed Purple Stripe, and Rocambole.

• Three varieties of "weakly bolting" hardnecks that can produce softnecks - Creole, Asiatic and Turban.

• Two distinct softneck varieties; Artichoke and Silverskins.

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     Even though it appears from looking at seed catalogs that there are many garlic cultivars, DNA analysis indicates that many of them are clones of each other and have merely been renamed..  This is for you James Charles, Tik Toks,  Wilder Tyson Yoga Wild Mike!

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