You Deserve Fresher, Stinkier Garlic
Also this week: We’re microwaving our tofu and roasting astounding amounts of lamb.
Welcome to Best Food Blog, a writer-run publication about eating by journalists Ali Francis, Anikah Shaokat, Anna Hezel, and Antara Sinha. You can check out everything we’ve published so far here. Today, we’re sharing our weekly cooking chatter, featuring some thoughts on garlic by computer programmer, sewist, and writer Nozlee Samadzadeh.
In 2020, I set a New Year’s resolution to buy fresher garlic — the kind that leaves my hands sticky when I chop it and my breath stinking when I eat it. The vast majority of garlic in our grocery stores comes from China, and setting aside concerns about unregulated pesticides and fertilizers, it’s often just really old and not very fragrant.
But after buying a braid of a dozen heads on a trip to the Bay Area heaven of Berkeley Bowl that January, I backslid on my resolution. In the summer I’d remember to grab a few heads of garlic at the Union Square farmers market when I went to buy my weekly dose of heirloom tomatoes, but in the winters it was back to the dusty heads in the supermarket bin. (I still avoided those three-packs of garlic heads — wrapping a naturally packaged vegetable like garlic in plastic mesh is such bad vibes.)
