BlinkyBill:

 

Fred99:

 

NZ grown garlic at $45.95/kg at the local supermarket - and there was only a few bulbs of scruffy-looking tail end stuff left at the bottom of a bin.  Seems the cheap Chinese stuff has run out for now (I never buy the Chinese stuff anyway)  - and panic buying has set in. 

 

Stop your panic buying morons - or stick to dunny paper.  Garlic does not stop the virus.  Prayer to the FSM might, and I need garlic as an ingredient in a sacred ritual - we drink his sauce to thank him for his sacrifice.

 

 

how does one tell the difference? Is Chinese garlic inferior? What about wasabi - is that inferior to Korean?

 

The Chinese garlic was pretty bad - tasteless and often quite dry/rubbery.  Standard price for it was about $5-10/kg, NZ garlic was typically about $25/kg - a much better product.

Actually as an edit to that - there's also Chinese single bulb garlic - sold in woven straw trays quite cheap.  There's still some of that in my local supermarket - and despite being not quite the same as normal garlic - it's actually pretty good/tasty with the bonus that it's easy to peel and chop.  Not rubbery - but crisp and crunchy.

Can't help WRT wasabi.  I do know that there was an attempt to grow it here for export to Japan that failed.  The story I heard was that the product was fine but as real wasabi is a bit sacred - they wouldn't buy it if it was free - so not a great commercial opportunity. Most of the "wasabi" served here (NZ) isn't wasabi.  Read the label and it's horseradish based, with green color to make it look like wasabi.  To be honest, I've eaten what was claimed to be "real" wasabi and it tasted the same to me as the fake stuff -  I've got no idea if I was conned and the real stuff was fake too. Korean wasabi - I have no idea either.  I'm addicted to certain brands of Ramyun, some are wasabi flavoured, but I'm really really too scared to read the labels -  I just pretend it's healthy because it's noodly - and close my eyes.