New to the farmers’ market this week — which, with its peas and strawberries and now also pretty, young zucchini, is inching closer and closer toward feeling like a true summer market, all overwhelming bounty and sumptuousness and things that leak juice when you bite them — were the garlic scapes.
Unlike the zucchini, these twisting curlicues are not debuting for their full summer run but making the briefest of cameos. Two weeks and they'll likely be gone.
The scapes grow atop hard neck garlic and are smooth, long twisting stalks with an arrow-like bulb that looks like something off a family crest. Garlic reproduces asexually, and the pointy bit is a seed pod, containing, as Pat 'n' Steph explain, a bulbils, rather than true seeds.
Farmers cut off the scapes so that, below ground, the plant can concentrate its energies on growing fat, moist heads of garlic. The scape is part of the garlic plant, then, though not the business end, so its garlic-ness is subtle. And unlike with the bulbs, which work in the service of other foods, the scapes are the party in themselves. They can be cut them into lengths and treated like string beans, eaten on their own or tossed into other dishes.
In last year’s New York Times, Melissa Clark — who I hope Pete Wells realizes is, aside from Frank Bruni, the shining star of the NYT Dining section — wrote a great piece about experimenting with both scapes and garlic greens, and she put them into a soup, a dip, pasta and even a souffle.
She wrote that Peter Hoffman, the chef at the Savoy, recommended grilling the scapes whole “to show off their curves,” which sounds like the most heavenly accompaniment to a grilled steak.
What would/will you do with the scapes?
0 comments:
Post a Comment