Garlic

• lehsunलहसुन

  Hindi

• ajo

  Spanish

• ail

  French

• aglio

  Italian

• thoum

  Arabic

• suan蒜

  Mandarin

• sarımsak

  Turkish

• bawang putih

  Indonesian

Pungent and hot at the front when raw, mellowing to sweetness with heat. Burnt garlic turns acridly bitter very quickly and cannot be recovered.

Sharp, sulphurous and penetrating when raw and cut; sweet, nutty and almost meaty when cooked slowly. Almost absent from an intact clove.

• Allicin — The raw pungency, formed on cutting and unstable — it degrades within hours and is destroyed by heat.
• Diallyl disulfide — A breakdown product of allicin, and much of what cooked garlic actually smells of.

How you cut it decides how strong it is. A whole clove simmered in a sauce is mild and sweet; the same clove crushed to a paste is several times more pungent, because crushing ruptures the cells that create allicin. Letting crushed garlic stand for a minute before it meets heat allows that reaction to complete; putting it straight into hot fat largely stops it.

Fried at the start of a dish as an aromatic base, usually with onion; pounded raw into dressings, aioli and toum; roasted whole until sweet and spreadable; and powdered into dry rubs and seasoning blends where fresh garlic would scorch.

• grinding — Crushing ruptures far more cells than slicing, so a crushed clove is markedly more pungent than a sliced one and a whole clove barely pungent at all. This is the single most useful thing to know about cooking with garlic.
• frying — Sugars brown and the sulphur compounds mellow into sweetness. The window is narrow: sliced garlic goes from golden to bitter in well under a minute at frying heat.
• baking — A whole head roasted slowly becomes sweet, soft and almost without pungency, because the allicin pathway is shut down before it produces much.

A firm bulb with tight papery skin and no give is good; softness, grey patches or a hollow rattle mean it has gone. For the powder, the test is smell — it should be immediately and sweetly garlicky through an open jar, and a powder that smells faintly of cardboard has nothing left to give a dish.

• Cloves that give under thumb pressure, or a bulb that rattles when shaken.
• Grey, yellow or sunken patches on a peeled clove.
• Green shoots at the neck — a quality matter rather than spoilage, and the shoot is bitter.
• Blue-green mould at the base plate, which spreads through a bulb quickly.
• Powder or granules caked into a solid block, which means moisture has reached the jar.
• A powder that smells of cardboard rather than of garlic.

Buy fresh for anything where the garlic is tasted, and keep powder as well rather than instead — they are different ingredients and a kitchen doing dry rubs or seasoning blends genuinely needs both. Pre-peeled cloves in brine and garlic pastes lose pungency quickly and often carry an acidic note from the preservative.

• Heavy for its size, with tight unbroken skin
• No green shoots visible at the neck
• No soft, dark or shrivelled cloves
• For powder: free-flowing rather than caked, and strongly aromatic

Amaryllidaceae

A perennial grown as an annual, producing flat strap-like leaves and, in hardneck varieties, a curling flower stalk. It is propagated from cloves rather than seed in nearly all commercial growing, so a crop is a clone of its parent.

Central Asia, in the region between the Tien Shan and the Hindu Kush, from wild Allium longicuspis stock. Cultivation had reached Mesopotamia and Egypt by the third millennium BCE, which makes garlic one of the oldest continuously cultivated seasonings in this dataset.

• CN — major producer. By a very wide margin the dominant producer and exporter, and the source of most commodity garlic powder.
• IN — major producer
• ES (Castile-La Mancha) — notable producer
• FR (Lautrec, Drôme) — notable producer. Several French garlics hold protected geographical indications, including the pink garlic of Lautrec.
• AR — notable producer

Lifted when roughly the lower third of the leaves have yellowed, which is a judgement rather than a date: too early and the bulb has not filled, too late and the wrapper skins split and the head will not store. The crop is then cured — left in a dry airy place for two to four weeks until the neck and skins are papery — and it is the curing rather than the growing that determines whether garlic keeps for a week or for six months.

1. Curing — Lifted bulbs dried in shade with air movement for two to four weeks until the outer skins and neck are papery and dry.Why: Sealing the bulb against moisture loss and mould. This single step is the difference between garlic that stores for months and garlic that does not.
2. Cleaning and grading — Roots trimmed, loose outer skins removed, and bulbs graded by diameter. Softneck bulbs may be plaited at this stage.Why: Presentation and storage life; damaged wrapper skins are where spoilage starts.
3. Slicing and dehydration — For the dried forms: cloves peeled, sliced and dried in stages at moderate temperature, then milled and sieved to powder, granule or flake.Why: A shelf-stable product. The heat of drying destroys alliinase, which is why the powder has no raw pungency and cannot regain it.

Fresh bulbs are graded on diameter, firmness, intact wrapper skins and freedom from sprouting; there is no consumer-facing standard and the grade is not stated at retail. Dried products are graded by particle size — powder, granulated, minced, flaked — which is a handling property rather than a quality one, and by whether anti-caking agent has been added.

Planted as individual cloves in autumn and lifted the following summer. Hardneck varieties send up a flowering stalk — the scape — which is cut off to push growth into the bulb and is sold as a vegetable in its own right; softneck varieties do not, which is why they are the ones that can be plaited and why they keep longer.

Temperate, and specifically requiring cold. Bulbs need a period near or below 10 degrees Celsius to divide into cloves at all — planted in a warm climate without that vernalisation, garlic produces a single undivided round rather than a head. This is why it is an autumn-planted crop across most of its range.

One of the oldest cultivated seasonings there is, and one that travelled without ever being a luxury. Garlic is documented in Mesopotamian and Egyptian records from the third millennium BCE — it appears in temple accounts as a ration for labourers rather than as a rarity, and cloves were among the goods placed in Tutankhamun's tomb. It reached the Mediterranean early, was eaten in quantity by Roman soldiers and disdained by Roman writers, and that split reputation followed it for two thousand years: a staple across southern Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and an object of class suspicion in northern Europe well into the twentieth century.

Never a spice-trade commodity in the way pepper or cloves were, because it grows in temperate climates everywhere and there was no scarcity to arbitrage. Its modern trade is agricultural rather than mercantile and is dominated overwhelmingly by China, which also supplies most of the world's dehydrated garlic — a genuinely modern product with no historical antecedent.