How did this happen? How did my garlic transform from sticky nightmare to user-friendly flavor dispenser? Have America’s garlic breeders suddenly focused on peelability as a saleable trait? Has competition from pre-peeled garlic somehow forced a change in the garlic farming world? I had to know the answer, so I called everyone I could think of who might know anything about garlic.
I asked if anyone was breeding garlic specifically to improve peelability, and she told me something I hadn’t previously known: “There’s hardly anyone breeding garlic at all.” Garlic, it turns out, isn’t like other crops, where you plant seeds, grow a plant, harvest it, and then, next year, plant a new seed.
One such researcher is professor Rina Kamenetsky of the Volcani Institute in Israel. When I called her and told her I was writing about peelability, she said, “Nobody, probably, knows a lot about that.” She apologized and told me that the goal of her breeding program is not peelability. “It is disease resistance. Pest resistance.” Garlic, she said, has a real disease problem. “The cloves you plant carry the whole infection load from last year. Everything you had last year, you plant next year.
The problem, Drucker said, is that “the easier to peel, the worse the storage.” That is, easy-to-peel garlic doesn’t last as long after it’s picked. The whole reason rocamboles are easy to peel, for example, is that there’s a teensy bit of space between the clove wrappers and the cloves themselves. “But that allows more pathways for area-fed mites to get in. Varieties with tight clove skins, while harder to peel, are much less susceptible to mite pressure.
Huh? 🤷♀️
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