Garlic and It's Many Flavours

  I've been thinking about this story lately, and just wanted to share it:

  My older sister Sheri, who used to partner with me in growing the garlic, was going on a trip over to Germany with her boyfriend last November, to visit his family there. As they were weighing their backpacks for the airport, I went and got a couple jars of the garlic powder that I make. Not being able to travel with them, I wanted to at least be a small part of their trip, in the gifts they could share with the people they met.

  Thousands of years ago, travelers would carry garlic bulbs in their packs and trade them up and down the silk road, spreading new varieties of garlic throughout Europe. Following this tradition, but also respecting Airport security, a couple jars of my dried powder got nestled safely into Sheri's pack.

  After Germany, my sister and her boyfriend Tobias, toured eleven other countries in Europe, and at the end of their trip, flew out to the Spanish Island of Mallorca, where the sub-tropical climate had everything lush and green, with olives and oranges growing even at the start of January.

  One of the places they visited there was the home of a farmer and garlic grower. With her last bottle of garlic powder, Sheri traded some goodwill. She told me later that this fellow was fervently happy to receive, "Canadian Garlic!" He lifted the lid to gasp in delight at the sharp smell of it. Canadian garlic, he said, is so much stronger and more flavourful than what he can grow in Mallorca. He was a BC resident of Grand Forks, before moving to Mallorca, and missed the taste of home.

  Making this kind of connection with someone like that, I felt, was the best part of their trip, though Sheri raised a bemused eyebrow at me when I told her so. Sheri couldn't tell me what variety Sky was growing in Mallorca, but I can imagine that whatever kind it was, it just didn't get the right winter dormancy and probably had a whole different soil composition effecting the flavour.

  In Canada we grow many varieties that are both strong and flavourful, including Porcelain types, Purple Stripes and Rocamboles. Our cold winters and warm summers, and good soils make up for the rest of it.
  In Cuba, I've heard, it is hard for farmers to grow garlic bulbs much bigger than a golf ball, though the tiny cloves are greatly priced by the locals. They owe this mostly to their lack of winter weather, or so I'm led to believe.
  Personally, I have always been a little jealous of Spain and France, for that area of mainland Europe can grow massive bulbs of Creole garlic. I have been in love with creole garlic ever since I've read Filaree Farm's description of that variety in their catalogue. Now that I have acquired twelve creole strains to grow myself, I've nick-named them "pearls of the earth"; because they are special, with their pearly sheen and long keeping abilities; but also because they are quite small in size.
  There are other varieties that I grow in Ontario, without much success, that grow really well in other parts of the world. So isn't garlic fantastic! It has travelled with people almost everywhere they have gone on the globe, and as a species, calls many many places home.

  So what makes garlic flavourful?

  Well, sulphur is one of the most important elements of flavour in garlic (and other alliums). We see this most clearly in the story of Vidalia onions, those large, sweet baseballs that are only available in season. True Vidalias are grown in Vidalia, Georgia, where the low sulphur content of the soil accounts for the mild flavour of the variety. The sweetness, really, is there all along, Vidalias may have more of it than most kinds, but all garlic and onions have a high content of sugars in their bulbs, to help with freezing and over wintering, you just can't taste it because of the heat that so often accompanies and overpowers that sweetness. Notice too, that Vidalia oinions, and most other sweet varieties of onion, do not keep as well as cooking onions. This is also an effect of sulphur. Low sulphur content in the onion bulb, or garlic clove, can be a major contributing factor to poor storage quality.

  Elemental Sulphur requires biological soil life to convert it into a sulphate before it can be used by plants. I work with a crop and livestock consultant, who told me that other consultants in the States recommend almost twice the amount of sulphur be put on the fields as a mineral amendment, than what he would suggest for Ontario. The reason being that in southern climates, the soil life is active for a longer period of time than it is for us in Canada. The soil life uses that much more sulphur (and other minerals) for every growing season, as well as possibly getting more soil leaching from high rainfall. I imagine that if sulphur is not a priority in the fertilizer, one could get sulphur deficient soils much more easily in sub-tropical climates, and consequently, produce a milder, sometimes poorly flavoured garlic.

  It is not just sulphur though. Garlic, with it's high sugar content, and coarse root structure, relies quite heavily on soil life to make nutrients available to the growing plant. It needs certain things like Phosphorus, for energy and boron for making sugar, and the whole plethora of trace minerals to give it depth of flavour and keeping quality. Flavour is one of the most complex aspects of plant genetics, and no one has quite figured it out, but we do have a starting point.

  For an experiment I tested some garlic leaves for a few basic minerals last year. One batch was from heathy plants, and one from plants that were not doing so well, and were going to be culled soon. Here were the results:


Heathy Plants:                                              Unhealthy Plants:
80.2 % Moisture                                           81.0% Moisture  

19.8 % Dry Matter                                       19.0% Dry Matter
On a Dry Basis:                                             On a Dry Basis:

1.78% Calcium                                             2.25% Calcium

0.44% Phosphorus                                        0.32% Phosphorus

0.33% Magnesium                                        0.23% Magnesium

1.09% Potassium                                          1.37% Potassium

0.01% Sodium                                              0.01% Sodium

0.32% Sulfur                                                0.29% Sulfur

31 ppm Iron                                                  38 ppm Iron                                            

32 ppm Zinc                                                  23 ppm Zinc

10 ppm Copper                                              8 ppm Copper

15 ppm Manganese                                       13 ppm Manganese

4 ppm Molybdenum                                       2 ppm Molybdenum


  Samples were taken of the top leaf of numerous plants, cut and tested in mid June. As you can see, Calcium and Potassium are higher on the Unhealthy test, but almost all the of the other minerals are lower. It actually has a less balanced mineral profile, which may be a big part of flavour as well.