Sulmona Red Garlic

This is a local ecotype of Allium sativum grown in the Valle Peligna, in the province of L'Aquila, around the town of Sulmona. It has no EU designation: it is on Abruzzo's list of traditional agri-food products, and an application for IGP status has been running for years without yet concluding.

The name misleads anyone who has not seen one. The whole bulb is white: the outer wrappers are pale, and from the outside it looks like ordinary garlic. The red is underneath, in the skins that wrap each individual clove, a bright purple-red. You find it only by opening the head, and that is the first authenticity check.

The bulb runs four to seven centimetres across, with eight to twelve large, regular cloves in one or two ranks. The flesh is firm, white and crisp.

What sets it apart in the kitchen is concentration. Essential oil content is above average, around 0.5 to 0.6 per cent against 0.3 to 0.4 for ordinary garlic, which means a fuller aroma, a sharper heat and a longer finish. You need less of it, not more.

One more feature, agronomic but with practical consequences: this is a hardneck garlic, so it throws a flower stalk. The scape has to be cut in June for the bulb to fill out, and the cut scapes are sold in bunches and eaten as a vegetable.

Sharper and rounder than supermarket garlic, with a clean heat rather than a dull acrid one. Raw, it hits hard and then fades cleanly instead of lingering as a stale note; the aroma is closer to a French rose garlic or a Spanish Roja than to the soft white bulbs sold in nets.

Cooked gently in oil it turns sweet and nutty within a couple of minutes and perfumes the whole pan. Roasted whole in its skin it collapses into something creamy and mild enough to spread on bread, the preparation that shows the difference most clearly.

The practical consequence of the higher oil content is dosage. One clove does the work of one and a half supermarket cloves, and it burns faster too: the compounds that carry the flavour turn bitter sooner over heat.

Use less. That is the first adjustment when switching from ordinary garlic: one Sulmona clove does the work of one and a half supermarket cloves, because there is more essential oil in it.

Raw, it belongs in preparations where garlic is the point: rubbed on grilled bread with new olive oil, in a green sauce, emulsified into an oil-and-garlic dressing. If there is a green germ in the middle of the clove, take it out: that is the bitter, hard-to-digest part.

Cooking follows the usual rule for good garlic, but with less margin for error. Start it in cold oil over low heat and pull it out or kill the heat the moment it turns blond. Burnt garlic is bitter, and with something this aromatic the mistake is twice as loud.

Abruzzo uses: spaghetti alla chitarra with garlic, oil and chilli; roast lamb with garlic and rosemary under the skin; a base of garlic and dried sweet pepper for sauces; pallotte cacio e ova, where the garlic goes into the tomato. And the June scapes, boiled with oil and lemon or fried with eggs.

Worth doing once: a whole head, skin on, roasted at 180 degrees for forty minutes. It comes out creamy and sweet enough to squeeze onto bread, and in that form the intensity becomes an advantage rather than a hazard.

A braid hung in a cool, dark, airy room is the method, not decoration: air moving between the bulbs keeps the tunics dry and slows sprouting. It wants 10 to 15 C and low humidity, and it will hold eight or nine months, so a July harvest reaches March or April in condition. That is shorter than the twelve months claimed for industrial keeping varieties, because bolting garlics sprout earlier. From about April the cloves push a green shoot up the centre, the head goes soft and hollow as the clove feeds it, and the flavour turns bitter.

A whole head does not go in the fridge, because damp cold triggers exactly the sprouting you are trying to postpone, and not in a sealed plastic bag, where it sweats. Around March, when the braid begins to give, the rest converts: peeled cloves under oil in a jar kept in the fridge and used within the month, raw cloves frozen whole for six months, or slices dried in a low oven and ground to powder. June scapes hold a few days chilled and freeze after two minutes in boiling water.

There is one decisive check and it means opening a head. The outer tunics are white or barely streaked, so nothing shows from outside, which catches out anyone expecting the purple-skinned garlic sold in France and Spain. The colour is underneath: each clove should be wrapped in a bright purple-red tunic, and pale pink or white cloves are not Sulmona. Then count them. Eight to twelve large, regular cloves in one or two rows, not twenty small uneven ones. Then feel the neck: this variety bolts, so the centre carries the stub of the cut scape as a small rigid cylinder, and a head soft all through with no central core came from a braiding variety.

The head should be hard, with no hollow give under the fingers. Unbroken, it should barely smell at all, and the smell should arrive only when you cut it: a braid you can smell across the room has bulbs releasing sulphur compounds through damaged tissue. On the tag, look for the farm and the comune. Italian red garlic and Abruzzo garlic mean nothing, and braids assembled from mixed bulbs circulate even in the valley.

In Abruzzo, from the growers and at the Sulmona market, at 12 to 20 euro per kilo. A twenty-bulb braid weighs about a kilo and a half and costs 18 to 30 euro; hundred-bulb braids are sold for a year's supply. Elsewhere in Italy specialist grocers charge 20 to 30 euro per kilo, with a real risk of braids assembled from bulbs of other origins.

Abroad it is rare. Italian specialists occasionally list it at 14 to 25 dollars per pound in the US or 18 to 30 pounds per kilo in the UK. What travels more easily is planting stock, sold by Italian seed suppliers, this garlic is straightforward to grow in any climate with a cold winter.

The test when buying is always the same: break a head open. The outer wrappers are white on every bulb and tell you nothing; the skins around the individual cloves must be bright purple-red. Eight to twelve large cloves, not twenty small ones, and a firm woody stub in the centre where the scape was cut. The head should be hard with no give under the fingers, and should barely smell until you cut it: a braid that carries at a distance is fermenting.

Sulmona, where the market under the arches of the medieval aqueduct in Piazza Garibaldi is the most direct place to see and buy the braids, especially from July onwards.

Mid-July, right after the harvest, is the moment: new braids fill the stalls and the town holds its garlic fair, though dates shift from year to year and are worth checking.

In the valley villages (Pratola Peligna, Raiano, Vittorito, Introdacqua) you can buy straight from the growers, and several farms also sell scapes in June, the only weeks of the year they exist.

The most Sulmonese afternoon available is also the simplest: a braid of garlic and a box of the town's famous sugared almonds, bought a few hundred metres apart.

Around it, the Majella massif, the hermitage of Celestine V on Monte Morrone and the Sagittario gorges fill the rest of the day. Local trattorie serve lamb with garlic and spaghetti alla chitarra: two dishes that would be something else without this garlic.