Jason Diamond’s younger years were culinarily magical: a neighborhood full of first- and second-generation immigrants meant that going to his friends’ houses exposed him to food from all over the globe. One food in particular, a Bukharan dish whose actual name he didn’t even know, turned him into a garlic lover. Years later, living in New York he went on a quest to find it—and ended finding out more about garlic than you thought possible.
Today garlic is everywhere, and the stinky little bulbs make about $21 billion annually across the planet. China grows the bulk of it—nearly three-quarters of the world’s supply comes from there. It’s been growing there for thousands of years, but since it’s such big business, anything you buy from your supermarket sourced from there probably wasn’t harvested wild. If you happen to get a head or two from one of China’s neighbors to the west, it’s likely that grew wild, and the flavor difference is astonishing. Whereas most grocery store garlic in the United States tends to have a bitter, spicy taste to it, Kazakh garlic, for instance, has a nutty, earthy flavor without the sharpness of the stuff shipped over from China. If you’re able to try garlic from Central Asia, that, to me, is the real stuff. It’s organic, pulled from the ground, and has a richness to it that you can’t create in a lab. It makes you realize just how much we’re missing when it comes to flavor in America—not just with garlic but with almost any food item.
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