Two Feet in the Dirt

It continues to be a funky spring. After a few blazing hot days a couple weeks ago, we’ve settled into a pretty steady stream of cool, cloudy, drizzly weather. With lows tonight forecast to go below 50 degrees, it feels more like my June in Michigan rather than our typical hot, sunny Junes in Philadelphia. However, this winter was warm enough that even with a cool spring, things are still ahead of schedule. This includes the garlic, which started producing scapes over a week ago. 

Garlic comes in two general varieties- hard-neck and soft-neck. You’ll notice the difference as soon as you break a head of garlic open. Hard-neck is composed of a single row of large cloves around a papery center whereas soft-neck has cloves all the way to the center. As a result, you will get a variety of sizes of cloves in soft-neck garlic, with larger cloves towards the outside of the head and teeny-tiny ones towards the center. Because of this, I prefer hard-neck varieties. I just can’t stand peeling those tiny little cloves on the inside of soft-neck heads!

Another difference between hard- and soft-neck garlic is that only hard-neck varieties produce garlic scapes. These curly green shoots emerge from the top of the garlic plant about a month prior to harvest and, if not removed, would eventually become the flower of the plant. However, removing them in a timely manner is essential to allowing the head of garlic to grow to full size underground before being harvested. And as an added bonus, garlic scapes are wonderful to eat! They have a sweetness to their garlicky bite that I think surpasses actual garlic. While you can cook them, I find they lose much of their flavor this way, so I prefer eating them raw. Check out your local farmers market to pick up some scapes during their very short season and I recommend the recipe below as an excellent way to eat them! We love this on pasta or as a spread on sandwiches.