Garlic
Latin Name: Allium sativum
Elephant Garlic: Allium ampeloprasum
Spanish: ajo
What is there to say about garlic. Garlic is the heart of so many of our meals, the rich, savory secret to almost any dish. Growing from a bulb like their onion cousins, garlic grows into multiple cloves, which are referred to as little teeth or dientes in Spanish and Portuguese. Elephant garlic is like a giant head of garlic with a more mild buttery flavor, but it is a different species entirely.
Garlic can be enjoyed in all of its stages of growth. In the Pacific Northwest, garlic cloves are generally planted in the fall and start sending up a green shoot through the winter. In the spring, young stalks of green garlic can be harvested to thin out the patch. Then in late spring through early summer, garlic puts up its flower stalks, or garlic scapes, which are also delicious and can be harvested to help the plants continue to allocate all their resources toward developing the bulbs.
I particularly love harvesting young garlic heads or Fresh Garlic after they’ve bulbed up a little more but before the cloves have separated, and you can just slice through the entire head of garlic like an onion, it’s incredible. Fully developed bulbs are harvested in the summer once the greens start drying out and can be pulled and left to cure, cook with, and store.
A Somewhat Chronological Gallery of Garlic’s Lifecycle
Recipes
Recipe by Brita from Food with Feeling