Garlic Without Apology - One Bulb, Thousands of Years, and the Story Behind Wilde Garlek
- michel1492
- 6 hours ago
- 15 min read
Before Garlic Was in the Spice Cabinet
In Los Angeles in 1918, a woman named Lydia and her husband, Charles B. Gentry, started a chili powder company. There was nothing particularly garlicky about it. The C. B. Gentry Chili Powder Company dealt primarily in chili powder and paprika, and like many small start-ups, it had few employees and struggled to survive. Neither of them could have known that this little spice business would eventually become part of the story of how garlic moved from the produce basket into the American spice cabinet.
Charles died in the mid-1920s. Lydia later married George E. Clausen, a key employee at the company's Southern California headquarters, and together they kept the business going. Then came the Great Depression. Keeping a small spice company alive meant finding things people would buy, so Gentry began to diversify, and among the products the company explored were dehydrated onions and garlic.
At the time, there wasn't much demand. Garlic was still garlic, something you grew or bought fresh, then peeled, chopped and put into the pan. As George Clausen Jr. later described it, dehydrated garlic was simply a companion product line for the chili powder and paprika business. But something important had begun. Garlic was becoming a spice ingredient, and Lydia's company was not the only one trying to figure out how to make that happen.
How Do You Dry Garlic Without Losing the Garlic?
In the spring of 1932, W. A. Hume, William Pardieck and J. H. Hume became interested in the possibilities of dehydrating vegetables. They went looking for a place to make the idea work and spent a year experimenting in Texas, but the climate proved too moist for what they were trying to accomplish.
They returned to California and continued experimenting, eventually working with a dehydrating plant in Vacaville. Drying vegetables was one thing. Preserving the flavor people actually wanted was another. Considerable experimentation and laboratory work went into figuring out how to process onions and garlic without losing their distinctive character. Their work became part of Basic Vegetable Products, which would grow into an important producer of dehydrated onion and garlic.
It is easy to overlook how significant that experimentation was. Today we can walk into almost any grocery store in America, pick up a bottle of garlic powder and never give a thought to the technology behind it. But garlic powder was not inevitable. Someone had to figure out how to make garlic stop being fresh without making it stop tasting like garlic.
And for that, they needed an awful lot of garlic.
Meet the Garlic King
Several hundred miles south of Vacaville, a Japanese immigrant farmer was growing it. His name was Kiyoshi Hirasaki, although most people called him Jimmy. Hirasaki was born to a farming family in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan, in 1900 and came to California at fourteen to join his father and older brother. He went to school, worked as a laborer, learned English, took a job with a seed company in Milpitas and later opened his own seed shop in San Jose, where his family lived in the back of the store.
In 1932, he borrowed money to buy a 400-acre ranch in Gilroy. The land was difficult at first, but the operation grew. Before the war, the ranch had expanded to roughly 1,600 acres planted in a variety of crops and seeds. What Hirasaki became famous for was garlic. Garlic did exceptionally well in Gilroy's relatively dry climate, and by 1940 his farm was reported to be the largest garlic operation in the United States. People began calling him the Garlic King.
Today Gilroy and garlic seem almost inseparable, but cities do not simply wake up one morning with culinary identities. Someone has to plant the crop. Someone has to discover that it grows well. Someone has to create a market for it. Japanese immigrant farmers, Hirasaki among them, were important participants in building the commercial garlic industry that would eventually make Gilroy famous.
A Garlic Factory in the Front Yard
And then Hirasaki met the spice business. Gentry had already been experimenting with garlic dehydration, and in the late 1930s George Clausen Sr. approached Hirasaki about a site for a plant. The relationship became wonderfully literal. According to Hirasaki's oldest daughter, Mineko Sakai, Clausen wanted to build the plant right in their yard. Her father said that was too close to the house. So he sold Clausen a couple of acres along Pacheco Pass Road instead, and there, beside the farm, the garlic plant went up.
I keep coming back to that scene. Garlic growing in California soil on one side, and garlic being transformed into something entirely new on the other. The distance between the farm and the spice cabinet had suddenly become very short. Then the world went to war.
When Garlic Went to War
After Pearl Harbor, dehydrated food became far more important than anyone running those early plants could have anticipated. The American military needed food that could travel enormous distances, and removing water reduced weight while extending storage life. The U.S. Army approached Clausen about supplying processed garlic and other vegetable products, and because Gentry had almost no capital of its own, the government helped finance a large facility at the company's Gilroy site.
Hundreds of Gilroy residents worked there around the clock. Much of the preparation was done by hand, and the plant eventually earned the Army-Navy E Award for excellence. A technology that had struggled to find a substantial civilian market suddenly had an enormous customer.
But the war divided this garlic story in another, much darker way. Jimmy Hirasaki was Japanese. After Pearl Harbor, he was arrested by the FBI and held first at Sharp Park, then at Fort Lincoln in Bismarck, North Dakota. His family, which by then included eight children, resettled in Grand Junction, Colorado. He was released in September 1942 and rejoined them there. The man whose fields had helped build Gilroy's emerging garlic industry was forced away from the farm that had helped create it.
That matters. Food history has a habit of becoming charming when we are not careful. Old recipes, family businesses, farms and kitchens make lovely stories. But food does not exist outside human history. The same fields that tell us about agriculture can tell us about immigration. The same factory can tell us about war. The same crop can lead us into questions of race, labor, government policy and belonging.
After the war, Hirasaki and his family returned to the Gilroy ranch, which had been managed in their absence by a white friend who used rental income to keep the property intact. Hirasaki went back to farming. He built the operation back up, became active in the Buddhist Churches of America and helped found a newspaper. He died in Gilroy on Christmas Eve in 1963. His contribution remains part of Gilroy's history. So does the garlic.
The War Ended. The Garlic Didn't.
When the soldiers came home, the dehydration plants remained, and that was not immediately good news. Gentry found itself holding a large processing operation built for wartime demand with very little consumer appetite for what it made. The company laid off workers, struggled through the rest of the decade and was eventually sold in 1951 to Consolidated Foods of Chicago.
Then the customers arrived: restaurants, institutional kitchens, food manufacturers, spice companies and, increasingly, American households. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the market for chili powder, paprika, onion and garlic seasoning products expanded dramatically. In 1958, a former Gentry employee and a group of Gilroy growers and businessmen started a competitor called Gilroy Foods. The company built a plant nearby and began processing garlic. In early 1961, Gilroy Foods was sold to McCormick & Co., which modernized the equipment and kept the operation alive. Garlic was becoming something earlier cooks would have found rather strange: a shelf-stable spice.
Garlic Becomes More Than One Ingredient
Once garlic could be reliably dehydrated, another possibility emerged. It could be made into different forms. A larger dried piece remains a flake. Reduce the particle size and you get granules. Grind further and you get powder. Those differences may look trivial until you cook with them, and then they are not trivial at all. A fine particle disperses quickly through food. Granules behave differently. Flakes hydrate differently and give larger, more identifiable bursts of garlic.
For the first time, a spice maker did not merely have to ask how much garlic to use. There was another question: which garlic? And that question turns out to be much older than the factory.
A Medieval Cook Had Already Figured Out Something Important
More than five hundred years before Jimmy Hirasaki planted garlic in Gilroy, an English cook was already doing something that feels surprisingly familiar. Around 1390, the cooks associated with the household of King Richard II compiled a collection of recipes known as The Forme of Cury.
Among them is a recipe with the wonderfully uncomplicated name Salat. The cook gathers parsley, sage, borage, mint, fennel, rosemary, rue, purslane and cress, and then something caught my attention: green garlic, chibolles, onions, leeks and porrettes, all together, all fresh, all from the same broad family. The medieval cook apparently saw no reason to choose among them.
That matters because garlic, onion, chive and leek do not taste identical. Put them together and they do not simply create more onion. They create layers. It is exactly the kind of decision cooks still make. The recipe is not Wilde Garlek's ancestor, and it would be irresponsible to pretend that it is. Salat was made from fresh plants and herbs, not dried seasoning, and there is no pepper in it at all. But it documents an old culinary understanding: related flavors can become more interesting when they are layered rather than substituted for one another.
Pepper adds another history, and it is one I brought to the blend rather than one I found in that medieval recipe. Unlike the alliums growing near European kitchens, black pepper traveled extraordinary distances to reach medieval cooks, connecting European dishes to growers, merchants, ports and trade networks extending toward South and Southeast Asia. Put pepper beside garlic and onion and something remarkable happens before anyone takes a bite: the local garden and the global spice trade meet in the same bowl. That same meeting still happens every time we make a seasoning blend.
Then We Learned to Capture What the Cook Was Doing
For centuries, most of garlic's transformations still happened in the kitchen. A cook crushed it, sliced it, pounded it, boiled it, cooked it slowly or browned it. Every treatment changed the result. Modern processing allowed us to capture some of those transformations before the garlic ever reached the cook's pan. Dehydration gave us flakes and granules. Toasting gave us another possibility, because browning garlic before it enters the blend builds some of that deep, nutty character directly into the ingredient.
Then there is the strangest garlic on my blending table: black garlic. Black garlic begins as ordinary garlic, but sustained controlled heat and humidity transform it dramatically. The cloves darken, the familiar sharpness retreats, and sweetness and deep savory flavors emerge. Its history is not as tidy as the internet sometimes suggests. Black garlic is frequently described as an ancient Korean or Asian food, while others insist it is a twenty-first-century invention with patents attached.
Food scientists reviewing the literature tend to say plainly that its origins are uncertain and contested. So I am not going to give black garlic an ancient birthday simply because that makes a better story. Sometimes good food history requires saying: we don't know. What we do know is that modern controlled production has given contemporary cooks another extraordinary expression of the same bulb. And that brings me back to my blending table.
Four Little Piles of Garlic
There are four little piles of garlic in front of me: granular garlic, garlic flakes, toasted garlic, black garlic. I had not set out to put centuries of culinary knowledge and a hundred years of food technology into a seasoning pouch. I was trying to make a really good garlic seasoning. But once I started thinking about why those four garlics tasted so different, I realized there were a lot more people standing at that blending table than I thought.
There was the medieval cook who looked at garlic, onion, chive and leek and saw no particular reason not to use all of them. There were merchants who carried pepper enormous distances until it became familiar in European kitchens. There was Lydia, trying to keep a small California spice company alive through a Depression. There were the Hume brothers, whose first attempt in Texas failed and who tried again, working out how to remove water from garlic without removing the reason anyone wanted to eat it. There was Jimmy Hirasaki standing in fields that helped turn Gilroy into garlic country, and then being forced away from them by his own country's suspicion. There were wartime workers running dehydration plants around the clock. There were postwar spice companies figuring out what American cooks might do with all that dried garlic. And there were generations of cooks who had already learned, simply by paying attention to their pans, that garlic does not have one flavor.
Not literally, of course, are all of those people standing in the Spicekeeper's Cottage with me. But their accumulated knowledge is, and suddenly those four little piles of garlic look different. Granular garlic gives me the foundation. Garlic flakes give me larger aromatic bursts and texture.
Toasted garlic brings the nutty, browned flavor that ordinarily develops through cooking. Black garlic gives me something darker, sweeter and deeply savory. Then I add onion, chive, black pepper and a little celery seed. The allium family stretches outward. Pepper brings warmth. Celery seed adds an aromatic edge that keeps all that garlic from becoming one enormous, flat note. And there it is: Wilde Garlek.
Where the History Becomes Flavor
Wilde Garlek has become a fan favorite at Oak City Spice Blends, which probably will not surprise anyone who believes the correct amount of garlic is simply more. But I do not think four forms of garlic are what make this blend most interesting anymore. The story behind them does.
Oak City Spice Blends is built around the idea that flavor has a history. The ingredients in our kitchens did not simply appear on grocery store shelves. Someone grew them. Someone traded them. Someone carried them across an ocean. Someone figured out how to preserve them.
Someone discovered what happened when they were crushed, toasted, dried, ground or cooked in fat. And sometimes, when I begin following one of those ingredients backward, I discover that the seasoning sitting in front of me is connected to a much larger human story than I ever expected. That is what happened with Wilde Garlek.
I started with four kinds of garlic. I ended up in a medieval English kitchen, on the spice routes that carried pepper across continents, inside a struggling California chili powder company, in Jimmy Hirasaki's garlic fields, beside experimental dehydration plants, inside the machinery of wartime food production and eventually back at my own blending table in North Carolina.
But this is where the story changes direction, because history is not where Oak City Spice Blends stops. It is where we begin. The medieval cook does not give us a recipe to reproduce. Lydia does not hand us a formula. Jimmy Hirasaki was not growing garlic for a seasoning that would be made generations later. What they leave us is knowledge, and knowledge gives us questions. What can we learn from the way earlier cooks layered related ingredients? What happens when an ancient spice meets modern food technology? What can four different transformations of one bulb contribute when we deliberately put them back together? That is where history becomes flavor again, and that, perhaps, is the best explanation I can give for Wilde Garlek.
It is not an old seasoning. It is not a reconstructed historical recipe. It is a thoroughly modern seasoning built from ingredients and ideas that carry very long histories. And tomorrow night, someone who knows absolutely none of this may shake it over potatoes, bloom it in butter for mushrooms, rub it onto chicken or stir it into pasta. They may simply take a bite and think, "That is really good garlic." That is fine with me. The history does not have to announce itself from the plate. It already did its work.
Through the Kitchen Window
There is something wonderfully human about the fact that after thousands of years of eating garlic, we still are not finished with it. We crush it, dry it, roast it, toast it and transform it. We bloom it in butter, rub it into chicken, toss it with potatoes, stir it into pasta and mushrooms and slather it onto bread. Every generation inherits what the cooks, growers and makers before them learned and then adds something of its own. That is how food keeps moving.
And it is how I think about the work we do at Oak City Spice Blends. We look backward not because we want to stay there, but because the past gives us somewhere interesting to begin. Sometimes that journey leads to a medieval recipe. Sometimes it leads to a merchant, a farmer, a factory or a forgotten kitchen. And sometimes it leads right back to four little piles of garlic sitting on my blending table. At which point there is really only one sensible thing to do. Use all four.
Garlic Without Apology.
Wilde Garlek Butter-Roasted Potatoes
Crisp-edged potatoes with plenty of savory garlic flavor. Blooming Wilde Garlek briefly in warm butter and olive oil before roasting helps wake up the blend and distributes the different forms of garlic throughout the potatoes.
Serves: 4 Prep Time: 10 minutes Cook Time: 35–40 minutes Bloom Classification: Gentle + Fat
Ingredients
1½ pounds baby potatoes, halved or quartered if large (680 g)
1 tablespoon unsalted butter (14 g)
1 tablespoon olive oil (14 g)
2 teaspoons Wilde Garlek (6 g)
½ teaspoon kosher salt, or to taste (3 g)
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley, optional (4 g)
Method
Heat the oven. Preheat the oven to 425°F (220°C). Line a large sheet pan with parchment paper or lightly grease it.
Prepare the potatoes. Cut the potatoes into roughly 1-inch pieces so they cook evenly. Pat them dry if necessary. Place them in a large bowl.
Bloom the Wilde Garlek. Melt the butter with the olive oil in a small skillet over medium-low heat. Add the Wilde Garlek and stir for 20 to 30 seconds, just until the aroma noticeably deepens. Do not let the garlic brown or burn.
Season. Immediately pour the warm seasoned butter and oil over the potatoes. Add the salt and toss thoroughly until the potatoes are evenly coated.
Roast. Spread the potatoes on the prepared sheet pan in a single layer, placing as many cut sides down as possible. Roast for 30 to 40 minutes, turning once, until deeply golden at the edges and tender in the center.
Finish. Taste and adjust the salt if needed. Sprinkle with fresh parsley, if using, and serve hot.
Why the Bloom Works
Wilde Garlek contains granular garlic, garlic flakes, toasted garlic and black garlic. Each contributes something different. Briefly warming the blend in butter and olive oil begins releasing those flavors before the potatoes ever reach the oven.
Keep the bloom gentle. You are not trying to fry the garlic.
You are waking it up.
And when the Wilde Garlek hits that warm butter, pay attention.
That isn't one garlic you're smelling. It is several moments in garlic's life arriving in the pan together.
The Spicekeeper's Tip
Don't crowd the pan. Giving the potatoes a little room allows moisture to escape so they roast instead of steam. For especially crisp potatoes, place the cut sides directly against the hot sheet pan
Sources & Further Reading
The Forme of Cury, “Salat,” c. 1390: Medieval Cuisine: Salat from The Forme of Curye. This page reproduces the original recipe and identifies the manuscript folios. I also found another transcription based on Hieatt and Butler's Curye on Inglish: Gode Cookery: Salat. The latter explicitly gives the version containing “grene garlec, chibolles … leek … porrettes.”
Brian Niiya, “Kiyoshi Hirasaki,” Densho Encyclopedia: Kiyoshi Hirasaki | Densho Encyclopedia. This is one of our strongest sources. It supports his 1900 birth in Kumamoto, arrival in California at fourteen, agricultural career, “Garlic King” reputation, wartime detention, September 1942 release, return to Gilroy, postwar farming and 1963 death.
Martin Cheek, “Gilroy's Garlic Roots,” Gilroy Dispatch, July 28, 2007: Gilroy's Garlic Roots. This is the source for much of the wonderful Clausen/Gentry/Gilroy Foods story and the relationship between the dehydration industry and Gilroy's garlic identity.
Martin Cheek, “The Original Garlic King,” Gilroy Dispatch, July 29, 2005: The Original Garlic King. This is especially useful for the human side of Jimmy Hirasaki's story and Cheek's interviews/research into the Hirasaki family.
City of Gilroy, Historic Context Statement and Historic Resources Inventory Update: City of Gilroy Historic Context Statement PDF. This is an excellent institutional source and probably the one I'd want a museum professional to see in our bibliography. The city also maintains a landing page for its historical resources: City of Gilroy Historic Resources.
Vacaville Reporter, November 22, 1940, “Commerce Body Told About Basic”: Vacaville Reporter archival page. I particularly like this source because it is contemporary, not somebody reconstructing the story decades later. J. H. Hume describes the origins of Basic Vegetable Products, the 1932 experiments, the unsuccessful Texas attempt, the return to California, the Vacaville operation, the experimentation needed to retain onion and garlic flavor, and even where their garlic was coming from.
Federal Trade Commission, Consolidated Foods/Gentry proceedings: FTC Commission Decision, 1963 PDF. This is the stronger FTC document for our purposes. It specifically states that Gentry built its Gilroy plant in 1940, that Basic had processed dehydrated onion and garlic since 1933, that Gilroy Foods began dehydrated garlic production in 1959, and that McCormick acquired Gilroy Foods in 1961.
U.S. Supreme Court, FTC v. Consolidated Foods Corp. (1965): FTC v. Consolidated Foods Corp.. This is useful corroborating evidence for the size and importance of Gentry and Basic in the dehydrated onion-and-garlic industry. The Court notes that immediately before Consolidated acquired Gentry, Gentry represented about 32% of industry sales and Gentry plus Basic accounted for almost 90%.
Kimura et al., “Black garlic: A critical review of its production, bioactivity, and application,” Journal of Food and Drug Analysis: Full-text scientific review at PubMed Central. This is the one I would use for the article. It describes black garlic production under controlled high temperature and humidity and, importantly for our wording, explicitly says that the exact origins of black garlic are unknown and controversial.
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