Pickled Garlic on sale in bulk in a Chiang Mai market.

Pickled garlic is a speciality of many villages around Thailand. One of the more famous is Si Racha on Thailand’s east coast, near the beach resort of Pattaya. No weekend getaway to the beach is complete without a stop at the roadside stalls to pick up several large bottles of pickled garlic for the round jolly lady everyone, including myself, calls “auntie” (ee).

Auntie runs a som tam stall at the low income housing complex near Bangkok’s old Don Muang International Airport. Her daughters, nieces and other relatives run various other stalls, including one that sells the best sun dried beef in Bangkok. Auntie was originally from Chiang Mai, so her collection of stalls is one of the few places in Bangkok where you can get authentic northern foods such as sausage (sai ooa).

You can probably find pickled garlic in a Chinese or Thai speciality grocers, but you can also make it yourself. Note that any recipe needs to be aged before it is used. Some experts recommend that you leave the jar in a sunny place for at least 15 days before refrigerating it.
 

There are indeed a great many versions of this dish, since the Burmese origins of the name imply an improvised dish, put together with whatever was on hand. Pork is always the meat used in Thailand, but you should be able to substitute chicken or beef with good results.

Burmese pork curry

Curry Paste

Ingredients

Preparation Method

• Make the curry paste by pounding all the ingredients together with a mortar and pestle to form a thick paste. Of course, you can do it the "easy way" and use a food processor.

Burmese Pork Curry

Ingredients

Preparation Method

• Sprinkle the dark soy sauce over the cubed pork.
• Mix in the prepared curry paste with the meat, and allow to marinate about 1 hour.
• In a large pot, brown the pork over low heat. Add the water, cover the pot and simmer until liquid is reduced.
• Add ginger, garlic and curry powder. Continue simmering until pork is tender and liquid is evaporated.
• Season with the tamarind juice. The taste should be a balance of sour, salty and spicy. If necessary, add salt.

To be completely authentic, Burmese Curry should be served with sticky rice.
 

Garlic, and some dried chilies.

I sometimes wonder if the abundant use of garlic is due to its wide availability, or if it’s availability is due to high demand. Garlic is the traditional second crop of northern farmers. Once the rice crop is harvested sometime in the cool season, around October to December, the farmers will typically plant a second crop. What is planted for the second crop traditionally depends mostly on how much water is still available for irrigation. Garlic requires a bit more water than other possible crops, but since it is such an essential ingredient as much as a quarter of the land around Chiang Mai was used to raise garlic as a second crop.

You almost never see fresh-picked garlic on sale in the markets, even the wholesale ones. Instead, the spice vendors will have great piles and baskets of garlic that has been partly dried on sale. The wholesale markets will often have great conical stacks of bunches of whole bulbs that have been bound or twisted together by the stalks. All stalls will have baskets full of separated cloves, usually in various sizes. The type most favored by Thais comes in very small cloves. This type has a very thin skin. Thai cooks will often simply crush the cloves with the flat blade of a cleaver and throw the whole thing into a stir-fry. It is certainly efficient, although it can be a bit of a surprise to western diners.

You will also see baskets full of very large cloves of garlic. It will come as no surprise that Thais call this "elephant garlic." Elephant garlic is almost never used in cooked dishes. Instead it is often used in salads, dips and as an accompaniment to meat snacks such as raw pork sausage or Chiang Mai sausage. Another type of garlic has small bulbs consisting of just a single clove. This type of ‘pearl’ garlic is mostly used for pickling, and that is the only form that you usually find it in the markets.

Pickled Pearl Garlic

Garlic is one of the oldest herbs in use. Its use was recorded in Babylonia as early as 3000 B.C. It was found in the tomb of Tutankhamen, while in Asia, it was mentioned in traditional Chinese medicine books starting around 500 A.D. Traditionally, garlic was used to treat colds and the flu, as well as chronic coughs such as bronchitis. It was also used for skin problems such as acne, and in Ayurveda medicine, garlic is considered an aphrodisiac. In addition to these traditional uses, modern medicine has found garlic useful in slowing arteriosclerosis, and reducing the risk of additional heart attacks in myocardial infarct patients.