Originally Posted By: Tom NJ
Originally Posted By: y_p_w
The biggest difference is between hard neck and soft neck garlic. Most of the garlic sold in the world is soft neck garlic from China. It's generally pretty weak tasting, but the bulbs are extremely uniform and the cloves are easy to peel. Hard neck garlic has all these misshapen cloves of different sizes, but I think it's a better and stronger flavor.
Actually you have that backwards. Softneck garlic (aka artichoke garlic) have non-uniform shaped bulbs (cloves upon cloves) with misshapen narrow cloves in the center. They are also harder to peel. These are the ones generally found in supermarkets because they store longer.
Hard neck garlic have a single row of fat cloves around a hard center stalk, are uniform in appearance, easier to peel, and are generally considered to have better flavor, often referred to as "gourmet garlic".
I wrote a brief paper on growing garlic I can PM to anyone who wants it.
Here are some hardneck bulbs from last year's crop.
Tom
OK. I'm officially confused. I remember reading about it somewhere and got the varieties confused.
However, around here there are basically only two kinds that I see in our markets. In California most markets will have the origin of produce next to the price. I haven't seen Chinese garlic sold loose in a while. It's usually available in bagged packs. Now that you describe it, yeah - that must be hardneck. However, the stuff imported from China is much cheaper but has less flavor and complexity. The neck is always completely cut off and the roots are completely gone. I've also heard that they might be bleached to make them appear whiter.
I do recall when there was a severe shortage of garlic in California a couple of years ago. I saw price spikes and the origin was often Peru or Spain. Most markets (other than Asian groceries) didn't stock Chinese garlic.