Jumbo in an allium sort of way
When the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant had its famous meltdown 40 years ago, a huge glob of destroyed building chunks mixed with zirconium and uranium coalesced into what observers said looked like an elephant’s foot, but that’s too scary, so let’s move on. In the late 19th century, cartoonist Thomas Nast drew an elephant standing at the edge of a pit as a symbol of the Republican Party which again these days is scary, so let’s keep moving.
Elephant garlic, however, is safe and healthy. Fancy folks pronounce it Allium ampeloprasum, but not me. It’s in the onion family. A technical point is elephant garlic contains allicin, a compound also in garlic, plus the compound in onions and leeks that makes some of us weepy but which is absent in garlic. Folks whose lifelong passion is orderly classification therefore consider elephant garlic more closely related to leeks than garlic.
Regarding what we call elephant garlic, Theophrastus, known as the Father of Botany and a friend of Aristotle, wrote in An Enquiry into Plants, “There is one kind which excels in size, especially that variety which is called Cyprian, which is not cooked but used for salads, and, when it is pounded up, it increases wondrously in bulk, making a foaming dressing.”
John Tradescant the Younger, gardener during the first half of the 17th century, included Giant Turkey Garlic (referring to Turkey the country) in royal gardens in England. Three hundred years later, Jim Nichols found a large mild-tasting garlic-looking vegetable growing in western Oregon in gardens of folks from central Europe. He obtained some, and his family grew it commercially, and in mid 20th century began marketing it as elephant garlic.
The Nichols family claims credit for the name and registered the name in 1951, yet for decades previous, Luther Burbank had already been developing “a wild garlic from the mountains of Chile which is a wholly distinct species from the common cultivated garlic, having much larger bulbs and a taller stalk similar to that of the leek.” He listed it in a 1914 article, and some historians credit him with the name for elephant garlic, though they are less confident that it came from Chile. Don’t matter to me.
Last month, there was a box of freshly harvested and cleaned elephant garlic bulbs in the bedroom where I was a guest. My host insisted I join the club, so I came home with one fully developed bulb, four one-year bulbs and scores of corms – more than I will ever need unless I go commercial.
Growing fully developed elephant garlic bulbs is a two-year process. The fully developed bulbs are for eating. The cloves are sticky like garlic but with a milder taste. I chop garlic into tiny pieces but elephant garlic not so much. Elephant garlic does not replace garlic in recipes if you want a strong garlic influence, but you can bake or grill a bunch of cloves with olive oil and herbs for a milder garlic experience.
The elephant garlic train starts with what some call bulbils – small, hard bulb-like corms which cluster around the bottom of fully-mature bulbs. A good time to plant them around here is early autumn, so it’s time to prepare the soil. The hard little corms are pointy on top. Before planting, you can snip those off if you choose. Arrange the corms 4-6 inches apart about an inch or so deep in a pleasing elaborate pattern, and keep moist at first. Loose neutral soil full of the best stuff nature has to offer would be a good place to start.
During the first year, corms develop into bulbs the size of a shooter marble. If left in the ground for another year, they burst into elephant garlic grandeur. That’s time to harvest, though, if left unharvested, the cluster of corms around the bulb will continue the natural process unassisted.
French surrealist poet Paul Eluard commented, “Elephants are contagious.” I suggest elephant garlic is the plant-based feta cheese of the allium world.