"It can be spicy, be strong but not hot, whatever you like," says Landon Jefferies, farm manager at Wyck, the historic house in Germantown. He mostly grows "German White" and what he calls "Keith's Rocambole," named for a farmer he used to work for in New York state.
At a sampling last weekend at Wyck, we spread Jefferies' roasted garlic cloves, like paste, on bread. They went down warm and full-bodied, with a fragrance so sweet, eyes all around the table closed in delight.
The consensus: amazing.
It tastes nothing like the supermarket stuff, which used to come from California. Over the last decade, however, the large-scale domestic garlic industry has been undercut by a super-cheap Chinese juggernaut.
Rather than grow their own, large U.S. operations now buy Chinese garlic offshore, import it through Mexican subsidiaries, and process it in their Central Valley plants, according to David Stern, a garlic farmer in Rose, N.Y., and director of the Garlic Seed Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization.
"The industry has imploded," he says.
Small-scale American farmers have seized the moment. They're marketing garlic like apples - as a regional, seasonal commodity - and playing to the public's hunger for sustainable and locally grown.
Like Dan Landis, who manages his family's organic Landisdale Farm in Lebanon County, they're growing more unusual and labor-intensive varieties that can cost $6 to $12 a pound, comprising five or six bulbs. And increasingly discriminating consumers are snapping it up.
Landis jumped into "niche garlic" six years ago after a customer asked for it.
"Back then, not as many people knew about it," he says, "but I realized it was a good fit."
