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Journalism of Courage
Artist and Twitter user Monyee Chau (@monyeeart) shared a meme to show there can be never enough garlic in a dish but the size of garlic cloves in her hand caused the image to be widely shared on social media.
Showing two huge cloves of garlic in her palm, she wrote that’s what she used when the recipe said “use two cloves of garlic”. However, many claimed they had never seen such oversized garlic before and the tweet got over 2.5 lakh tweets.
With many baffled whether the garlic was real or the result of a camera trick, she wrote that she had got it from a local Asian Grocery supermarket and had never seen them before.
https://twitter.com/monyeeart/status/1295500645022052354
People who love garlic in their food said they would also like to get the same garlic and asked her where she got it from.
https://twitter.com/JustJ012020/status/1296036195189895168
https://twitter.com/HI_Darius/status/1295861680467927040
However, people who had used this version of garlic before identified it as elephant garlic, which is milder than the smaller garlic. They also pointed out that using excess of it results in the food tasting more like leek than garlic.
https://twitter.com/MENA_Conflict/status/1295913612909805570
What is elephant garlic?
According to a report by The Guardian, this special garlic clove grows up to 5cm wide. “It’s not really garlic; Allium ampeloprasum grows like a large leek, but tastes like mild garlic. It’s perfect for roasting and baking,” says the report.
The species can traced to various parts of the world that have warmer climates. However, according to the National Vegetation Society in UK these giant garlic cloves were re-discovered in 1941 by an American nurseryman, Jim Nicholls, who found it growing wild in the gardens of an abandoned settlement called Scio in the Willamette Valley of Oregon.
“Scio had been colonised by immigrants from the eastern Balkans in the 1860s. The “herb”, as it was regarded locally, was called Scio’s Giant Garli,” the website said.
It is said that the man selected and bred only from the larger cloves and “over a period of twelve years he established a large, very hardy, disease free strain which he started selling commercially in 1953, having registered the name ‘Elephant Garlic’.”
