Brief notes on garlic & incompetence
I’ve lived in a grocery-poor, food-mad neighborhood for the past 11 years, once filled with eco-hippies who, at one point, started one of Chicago’s only co-op grocery stores. It remains the only viable grocery store in my neighborhood; at one point, 80% of Instacart’s Chicago sales happened here. Befitting a grocery store started by hippies in Chicago, in a neighborhood with by some margin the best farmers market in Chicago, the hippies responsible left – or got fired, who is to say, and the power vacuum was summarily filled with a moderately impressive blend of buffoonery, incompetence, fiduciary miscarriage, and abject malice. I am owner #200.
Befitting such an institution, the left hand never knows what the right hand is doing. This means I always know I am buying the right produce when I have absolutely flummoxed the cashier. After all, if it doesn’t look exactly like a normal thing should look, it is probably interesting, and is in season, and hence is exactly what I should be making food with at this moment.
This happened for the first time this season when I walked up to the counter with two heads of spring garlic, and the cashier exclaimed “what are these?!” Lovely question. I explained. A manager was called over for a price check. The manager had never seen this before, either. I kept saying it was spring garlic. A second manager is summoned. It is literally just garlic, people. Second manager keyed in the right code, I went on my way, and I blew some of my friends’ minds.
In a previous brick of text, I talked about how you have probably not seen the context around some of the foods that we have all taken for granted: coffee, pineapple, pepper. Garlic counts, too. Fresh, it grows tall, with long green leaves, like a cebollita, bulb at the bottom. The husks do not turn papery until later. You can chop everything up and do the same stuff that you normally do to garlic. People never know what garlic looks like when it’s been pulled out of the ground, do they?
The typical woodsy stalk in garlic’s center grows outwards as the scape, terminating in a flower. If you cut off the scape, the bulb grows more. So most people do, and then they sell the scapes separately. (Scape pesto is mindbogglingly delicious.)
I am an Italian person who makes lots of Sichuan food. As a result, my body is two-thirds garlic. I would give up any other allium before garlic. And there is no substitute for a bulb of fresh garlic, ripped out of the ground a day ago, leaves & scape intact, every part of it edible. Fresh garlic tastes floral, peppery, lemony. You could eat it straight if you wanted.
Preserved well, garlic keeps for a long time. You can tie multiple dried scapes off in a braid, and as long as a clove isn’t punctured, it will keep for up to nine months. I buy multiple braids from these humans at the final farmers market of the season, and it’s better than any store garlic you can find.
Garlic warrants its own text. There are no real recipes that involve garlic, only the practice. As with all good produce, the less you do with it, the better. You want to keep the delicate compounds there as much as you can.
There are two more takes from this text:
- My grocery store kind of sucks and there is no other option, except for when it has cool produce, at which point it kind of sucks in different ways.
- You should find garlic, in season, right now. Cook with it gently. It will reward you.