Russian Red Garlic (283/365)

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October 10, 2015 – If you’ve only ever used the small heads of white, or silver skinned, garlic for cooking, you don’t know what you’ve been missing.

A couple of years ago, on one of my drives back from visiting a facility in the Fraser Valley, I stopped in at a produce market I don’t get to very often. Alongside bins of freshly picked corn were piles of colourful purple bulbs of garlic of a variety I’d not used before.

I always thought garlic was garlic, that the silvery papered bulbs available year round in the grocery stores was all there was. Imported from California usually, we buy this normally available kind almost weekly. We love garlic.

But then I brought home a few heads of this more expensive garlic…and was hooked. This variety, Russian red, actually tastes like garlic. It’s crunchy, juicy and very sticky — the skin can be a challenge to get off but it is so very much worth the extra effort.

The cloves are larger, and have a faint purple tinge to them. They aren’t harsh or bitter like the little white heads of garlic, instead they exude a warm, aromatic garlic flavour with a sweet aftertaste. Best eaten before they are six months old, they aren’t available year round and don’t have an opportunity to sprout that bitter green germ that you find inside cloves of the silver skinned variety.

While it’s much more costly than the normally present garlic, when you find it at the farmer’s markets, stock up and keep it stored in a cool dark place. Or peel a bunch of cloves, put them in a small dish and cover with some good olive oil, and roast them in the oven at 300C for an hour to an hour and a half and then store in the fridge to use as needed. Garlic flavoured oil for cooking or making salads, creamy roasted garlic for use in breads, sautés, or whatever your fancy.

Fall is garlic season. I love fall.