I have just had a letter from Bill about my purple garlic article of a few weeks ago. Bill states that if I want really magnificent garlic, I should be growing elephant garlic, with its massive easy to peel cloves, tender stems and hardy habit of popping up again next year if you forget to harvest it.
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I entirely agree.
Elephant garlic (Allium ampeloprasum) is not a "true" garlic, but is closely related to a leek. It was years before I discovered it wasn't the real stuff though – if it looks like gorgeous giant garlic, smells like deliciously mild garlic, tastes like sweet and sumptuous garlic, and grows almost as large as an elephant's foot (a very small elephant, maybe one of the extinct island miniatures) then I was happy to call it garlic.
The best way to eat elephant garlic is to pick it when it's still a single bulb and hasn't developed the papery cover on the cloves and bake it slowly with a little olive oil till soft and creamy and mildly but richly garlic flavoured.
No, the best way is to pick the young stems and bake them in a little olive oil till they are soft and taste like leeks that have had a torrid affair with garlic.
And the very best way to eat elephant garlic is to peel the giant mature cloves and bake them slowly with small potatoes in their jackets till both are crisped and browned and taste of both garlic and potato … and be prepared to guzzle far too many.
Elephant garlic can be grown like true garlic – sown in spring or autumn in cold climates, or autumn to spring in frost-free areas. Plant about 5 cm deep and 30 cm apart. I like to fill the ground between them with pansies or another winter blooming annual ground cover.
And they will grow. If your true garlic vanishes, due to eelworm, slugs or snails, elephant garlic may survive the depredations of all of them.
It will keep growing, too, and sometimes produce a flower and seeds, either in the first or second year, if you don't harvest it when the stems yellow which is when the bulb will be best for storage, or earlier.
Like true garlic, elephant garlic grows biggest in rich, well-drained soil – the two things it doesn't cope with are boggy ground or undecomposed organic matter, both of which can lead to rot. Rotting garlic – true or 'elephant' stinks like, well, rotten garlic.
It's strange … I have been growing elephant garlic for decades now. It has never let me down and we eat it regularly, but it took Bill's letter to remind me to actually write about it.
Thank you, Bill!
This week I am:
- watching 'snow' showers of loquat flowers as the petals fall;
- discovering yet again that parsley turns softer and sweeter in Autumn;
- muttering at the limes … they are not ripening fast enough for our appetite for lime juice;
- trying to remember to water the seedling veg, despite the cold – the sub-soil may be moist but the top soil is drying out and that's what matters to seeds and seedlings;
- listening to the deep buzz of bees harvesting the last of the nectar from the hedges of blue salvia, so intent they don't get grumpy when I push my way through the bushes; and
- getting ready to dig up the first of the Jerusalem artichokes. And this year I will not over indulge. Possibly … Actually, come to think of it, I am likely to make a pig of myself, yet again. Baked elephant garlic and Jerusalem artichokes: deeply, gloriously delicious, but ahem, a trifle anti social in their side effects.
