Complex Numbers

Peeling Out

Today, some hard-hitting journalism sure to be eligible for a Pullet Surprise.

Is Garlic Getting Easier to Peel?  
To solve the mystery, I had to talk to horticulturalists, farmers, chefs—and also my local grocery store.

Mmmm... garlic chicken...

Where was I? Oh yeah. Most of the time, the answer to any question posed in a headline is "No."

For most of my adult life, I was a garlic-phobe. Not because I didn’t like the flavor! No, like basically every human on earth, I adore garlic...

I've known people who didn't like garlic. I avoid them, figuring they're vampires.

I loved eating garlic. What I hated, for years, was peeling garlic.

If only you could have relaxed your culinary snobbery long enough to purchase pre-peeled garlic. Or use (gasp) garlic powder. It has its place, you know.

What a drag it was! Let’s say your recipe calls for three cloves of garlic. Your onions are fizzing, your pasta is bubbling, and you’re cursing, trying to separate the garlic’s skin from the cloves within.

You know, I don't consider myself a gourmet chef, though I get by. And I've ranted before, in the Comedy newsletter and probably here too, about the frustration of garlic-peeling. But there's a concept called mise-en-place, which I knew about even before I started learning French. Literally "put in place" (the "place" is pronounced differently, of course), it means prepping most of your ingredients before starting cooking, so you don't find yourself struggling with peeling garlic, chopping onion, or whatever at critical stages in your cooking.

It's not always necessary. If you're broiling chicken or whatever, you can do some chopping while it's cooking. But having the garlic peeled and minced before you even turn the stove on is, in my estimation, pretty basic.

Like juicing a lemon or opening a stuck jar, peeling garlic is one of those kitchen tasks so pesky that gadget companies are forever trying to solve it for you. I’ve tried the shakers. I’ve tried the silicon rollers. I’ve tried cutting off the stem end and rolling the clove between my hands.

Cut off the stem end, twist the cloves a bit to loosen the skin (this also releases some flavor), and rub them together between your hands while standing over a trash can to catch the paper. You do run the risk of dropping the garlic, so don't do that. Notice I said "cloves." No matter what a recipe says, a single clove is never enough.

Annette recommends squeezing them under the flat of your vegetable knife, and that can work too, but it requires more tools than just using your fingers.

Also, juicing a lemon? Come on. The only trick to that is to do it through a sieve so the seeds don't squirt out onto your shrimp or whatever.

But over the past three years or so, something strange has happened to the garlic I buy at the grocery store. It’s become so much easier to peel!

The more you do something, the easier it gets.

How did my garlic transform from sticky nightmare to user-friendly flavor dispenser? Have America’s garlic breeders suddenly focused on peelability as a saleable trait? Has competition from pre-peeled garlic somehow forced a change in the garlic farming world? I had to know the answer, so I called everyone I could think of who might know anything about garlic.

So, not vampires.

“I don’t know that anybody’s measured that, peelability,” said Barbara Hellier, a horticultural crops curator with the United States Department of Agriculture in Pullman, Washington. Like a home chef with a particularly tough clove, she wrestled to unwrap the subject:...

Stretch metaphor.

I asked if anyone was breeding garlic specifically to improve peelability, and she told me something I hadn’t previously known: “There’s hardly anyone breeding garlic at all.” Garlic, it turns out, isn’t like other crops, where you plant seeds, grow a plant, harvest it, and then, next year, plant a new seed. Garlic seeds, from fertilized flowers on garlic plants, look a little like onion seeds, but hardly anyone generates and plants them—because why would you? All you need to grow a new garlic plant is just one garlic clove off a garlic bulb. (When you’ve left your garlic sitting around so long a clove sprouts a green shoot, you’ve begun that process.)

No garlic lasts that long around me.

The issue, Kamenetsky explained, is that unlike other crops, garlic mostly can’t flower and be fertilized. “In garlic, this was damaged in ancient times,” she said. “For 5,000 years, people selected for bigger cloves, and they continually selected against flowering.”

Okay, now, see, that's interesting. It's kind of like with bananas. Doesn't have anything to do with a peel, though. Oh yeah, I made that pun.

Within a year of opening, Serafini found a California farm that sold pre-peeled garlic, which is where the Stinking Rose now sources all its A. sativum. “What they do is they put it in screens that heat the skin to a certain temperature, dry it, and then they put it through a wind treatment, like a wind tunnel almost.” The wind blows the skins off. Serafini now swears by pre-peeled garlic: “It’s really the best way! It’s more consistent.”

See? Stop being a snob.

But I hadn’t solved this mystery! My grocery store wasn’t getting some special easy-peel garlic. No one was really breeding easy-peel garlic. So what had happened? It was time to go to the source: Harris Teeter, my grocery chain.

Ah, the problem begins to resolve itself.

The article goes on to describe how garlic shipped from further away has more time to dry and thus might be easier to peel.

I guess I’m grateful that the impossibly convoluted complexity of the intercontinental produce supply chain—which makes modern life more convenient in the short term but is destroying the planet for the long term—is the likely cause of my garlic’s new peelability.

Yeah, at this point, I'll take convenience. We're doomed anyway, so we might as well enjoy the ride. One of the few actual benefits of living in late-stage capitalism is global trade. And the planet's not getting destroyed; only the biosphere.

The result is a system in which buying local, freshly harvested produce can result, bizarrely, in a worse product.

There's nothing at all bizarre about it. If buying local actually gave us better products, we'd never have switched to a global trade model. The only reasons to source local is to support local farms and give yourself something to brag about on social media. The former of which I normally support, except when I know the farmers are voting for the wrong politicians.

But whatever. So, in general, like I said way back at the beginning, the answer is "no, garlic isn't getting easier to peel." Except in some individual circumstances. I'm going to keep wrestling with those little buggers anyway, because the taste is worth it.