Question
Dr K Kimmel
Can you talk about different varieties of garlic? I have Russia, Red and Elephant.
Answer
So I'm up in the north here. So I farm only hard neck garlic, and at this point I've got my own, um, I've got my own, uh, land race because I've been culling my own seed for about, uh, 10 years now. So I've got cloves. I, I do like a German extra hardy, uh, type variety, uh, or, or music is the other one. And I've sort of selected those two together. And I get big, beautiful cloves that are like four to six cloves per head. Uh, I just love it. I just got, uh, 1200 heads in the ground and, uh, looking forward to having that out. The other thing that I really love about being garlic farmers, when I go to plant my garlic, when I separate out those heads in, in to get the individual cloves that I wanna plant, uh, there's a bunch of cloves that I, you know, aren't quite up to snuff. They aren't the biggest cloves on the bulb, so I'm not gonna get a big nice, robust bulb from them. So I'll call those out. And like this year I ended up with like a hundred or so cloves that just didn't quite meet standards. So what I did was I just made a giant batch of garlic confie, and it's been simmering away on my stove now for several hours and just put in a giant tub of olive oil, all that garlic, several bay leaves, which I also buy by the pound. So I kind of use 'em by the handful and, uh, just simmer that away. And that's gonna sit in my refrigerator for the next three months or so. And it's gonna go into my mashed potatoes. It's going to be the oil that I use to drizzle onto my roasted root vegetables before they go into the oven. It's going to go into salad dressings. I'm gonna saute my kale with it. I'm just gonna eat it by the spoonful. Yeah, I'm gonna so up, sop it up with bread, et cetera. I'm gonna mash in some smoked anchovies into it and some fresh chopped mint and parsley with some chili flake and a couple cracks of black pepper. Put that out there with some bread as a little appetizer for people when they walk in the door on Thanksgiving. Woo. Right. Hey, that's a really good use of cold garlic and it's one of my favorite things that I get, you know, uh, right around this time of year, every year when I plant my harvest. So there you go. Oh, you do Russian red and elephant. Nice. Very cool. That's a nice mix. Spicy. And then the, the spicy of the Russian and the reds both very spicy. And then the elephant. Nice, nice nuanced, mild garlic. I love it.
