Garlic's unexpected gems
By Barbara Damrosch
Some of the best garden discoveries are made by accident. Last fall a friend gave my husband and me some family heirloom garlic. Against the standard advice, he hadn't removed the flower stems, known as scapes, when they appeared, and when he harvested he pulled up the whole plants -- bulbs, stems and flower heads. Inside the flower heads were tiny bulbils (above-ground bulbs) the size of rice grains. We broke apart the regular garlic bulbs at the base of the plants and poked the individual cloves into the ground the way you normally would plant fall garlic. On a whim, we also planted those tiny bulbils, one by one, just to see what would happen.
What we expected to find, come spring, was green garlic, a tasty scallion-like treat you get by planting any small garlic cloves you think aren't big enough to make full-sized heads. But the green shoots the bulbils sent up were so spindly they weren't worth eating, so we let them grow through the summer.
About three weeks before our regular garlic was mature, the bulbil-grown plants signaled maturity by flopping over their tops. We dug them up and, to our delight, found small, single (undivided) garlic bulbs that were round, like marble-size onions. I peeled them, sauteed them in olive oil, and strewed them on top of steamed spinach. Delicious! They had a distinct garlic taste, but milder, and they were -- no other word for it -- cute. We named them garlic pearls. Chef friends were envious.
What I've learned since then is that a type of hardneck garlic called Porcelain is more likely than others to form lots of small bulbils. Bulbils are sometimes planted as seed garlic for a variety of reasons -- for economy's sake, because they're more plentiful than garlic cloves, and to avoid soil-borne diseases, because they form on top of the plants. But my own goal is different. I want more of those pearls. I'd like to mix them with buttered fall peas or sprinkle them on top of pasta. I want so many garlic pearls that I can make a dish of them alone, with parsley, to serve alongside a steak. Fortunately, we planted lots of Porcelain garlic last fall, left the tops on this summer and saved the bulbils they produced. They're drying along with our garlic heads, and this fall we'll plant both crops.
Next year, if we work it right, we could have a spring crop of green garlic from the small cloves, a midsummer crop of pearls, then a fall crop of garlic heads for winter storage. Here's to year-round garlic heaven!
Article copyright of Barbara Damrosch. Reprinted with permission.
Photo credit: Martin LaBar
