upgrade.

Over the last X number of years, I've been forced to slowly come to grips with the fact that Amsterdam is not one of the culinary epicenters of Europe. Even London, a city not historically known for being a food town, seems leagues ahead in terms of gastronomic availability, sophistication, interest, etc.

But. One thing I cannot get used to here, one thing I will not get used to...

...is the crappy garlic. It's never been good, but mainstream garlic in Amsterdam actually seems to be getting worse. Based on what's available in Albert Heijn and Dirk van den Broek, the only explanation is that most local people here just don't have any idea what garlic is supposed to taste like.

Most of the time, what I've ended up buying is not even close to being fresh, by the time you take it out of the shopping bag, it's already smelling like something long-lost you've accidentally discovered at the bottom of your vegetable drawer/cupboard/etc.

Two slightly more reliable options are 1) to buy from a toko or a Turkish market, but this quality seems to go up and down as well. Or 2) if you buy bio/eko, you usually get something a little better than the standard but still not awesome. And still it's not always better.



Thus, a bit of good news: some kind of relief seems to have arrived, however temporarily, in the form of what I believe are maybe young garlic bulbs?

It's true, I know nothing about garlic other than what it's supposed to taste and smell like, so I could be totally wrong about what this is. But Dirk van den Broek has them these days, and once you get them home and into your Whodge, you can smell the difference immediately. There's no whiff of musty, moldy, shriveled, boring age when you crack these things open.

The bulbs aren't split into individual cloves, so you just cut the bulb into clove-sized pieces and get on down the road.


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