WBBC asked Warragul Farmers’ Market stallholder Leni Teng all about garlic.
Above: Leni Teng. Photo by William PJ Kulich.
First published in the 11 September 2015 edition of the Warragul & Baw Baw Citizen.
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Leni Teng, this doesn’t look like what people see in supermarkets.
This is spring garlic. It’s an early form of garlic, before they bulb up. You can use it like spring onions with a garlic flavour.
Does it have a strong flavour?
It’s mild, but you can still taste the garlic in there, so it’s really beautiful stir fried, you can put it in soup; anywhere that requires spring onion or garlic. You can roast it as well.
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So this will bulb up later in the season?
By November or December, if left in the ground, they will bulb up.
The thing about garlic is you can harvest it at any stage. If you harvest it early you get the spring garlic, and if you harvest it in a few months they will start to form a bulb and you will get an early form of a clove. If you use that before it dries up it’s called wet garlic. That’s nice as well – you don’t have to peel it, just use the whole thing from bulb to leaf, but if you have excess you can dry it and it becomes like normal garlic.
