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Wednesday 19 January 2011

Garlic

I want to talk to you about garlic. 

It's all very well growing herbs and veg, which as a gardener I am supposed to do with consummate ease.  But as well as being a gardener, I love to cook. If the produce I use is rubbish, then the end result is likely to be pretty poor too. (Move over Gordon - I know the process minutely from seed to gob and I can tell you what works and what doesn't.)

There is no doubt that the fat, succulent elephant and French garlic is a far superior animal than say, the small rounded hard garlic heads we are flogged by British supermarkets. The reason they flog us this nonsense is that it stores longer than larger cloved garlic so is economically more viable.

Elephant garlic has huge cloves, the size of a wrestler's knuckle and is milder, sweeter, more flavoursome (and in my not-so- humble opinion) far superior herb than the 'hard-necked' stuff.

You are going to have to go further than Sainsbury's, 'Tesco metro' or 'Happy Shopper' to find it. The local deli, farmer's markets etc will provide  sublime hedonism where the large food 'sheds' stumble; you will pay more, but boy is it worth it.

One of our favourite dishes we cook in our family is whole roasted chicken liberally studded with  garlic.  Use the hard-necked English varieties you will find the flavour is sharp, peppery and a bit astringent. Use large cloved garlic and OH WHAT BLISS. Sticky, caramel, soft sweet cloves that slip gently from the skin.

Take my word for it.

And whilst I'm on a rant, is anybody else fed up with supermarket fruit and veg that is tasteless, under-ripe and hard as bullets?  I bought three avocados that took at least a week to ripen even though I prodded them overnight to test their ripeness. EVERY night they remained a hard as marble. Suddenly I woke up one morning and the buggers were soft enough to use. Yippee. EXCEPT. When I cut them open the flesh was brown. Right up there with pears. There is only a nano-second in a pear's life when it is honeyed perfection.

INSIST when you next go to the supermarket that you will not put up with this cold-stored, tasteless, invariably overpriced garbage. You vote with your pennies. Old haddocky though it may be, even the busiest of us can report inferior merchanise to a store manager. Five minutes complaint from one in thirty of us and we shall see the quality of our fresh produce elevated to something approaching edible.  

There. I'm done.