Garlic

On Jeju Island, almost every other person lives or works on a farm. There are tangerine farms, green tea farms, cucumber farms, you name it. My grandma, even at 83, is still doing daywork on local farms, which makes me shake my head in amazement every time I think about it.

 

Right now it's garlic season, and I'm staying in a particularly garlic-y area (lots of garlic farms) so my grandma recently brought home a ton of garlic. She's going to plant them in her garden, so she laid them all out on the ground in the sun to dry for a day. Then we needed to separate each bulb into its individual cloves (tossing out the nasty mushy ones, of course). 

It's very tempting to use your fingertips alone for the job, but as my grandma had to keep reminding me, when you have a job this big ------------------------------------------------>

your fingertips will inevitably get very sore, so best to employ that fleshy part of your palm right under your thumb as much as possible. (My fingertips still hurt.)

After separating all the cloves, there's always a ton of debris from the outer peel, but all you have to do is fill a bin with your garlic cloves, wait for a good wind, and slowly pour them back onto the ground, as expertly demonstrated by my grandmother in the picture seen on the left.

When you're ready to use the garlic for cooking you peel all the cloves (which, incidentally, you would also do if you're planning to bring garlic through US Customs--one of the few exceptions to bringing produce into the US, no permit required), chop off the top grainy part where it used to be attached to the main stalk... and then there's some debate. Some say mincing garlic is better, some say crushing. The way I learned is:

• Crush the clove with the flat side of your blade
• Smash the partially crushed clove with the bottom of the knife handle (this part:

) 

or I guess you could just get one of these.

 

A lot of people say crushing brings out more flavor. It certainly is a lot juicier. (Tangent: This reminds me of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when Snape's note in the potions textbook said to "Crush [the sopophorous bean] with flat side of silver dagger, releases juice better than cutting.") (Another tangent: Perhaps crushed garlic wards off vampires better than minced garlic.) (Post-ending tangent: I wonder if they use crushed or minced garlic to make garlic ice cream. I wonder what garlic ice cream tastes like. I'm trying some next time I get a chance.)