I asked several different people what they thought the most
unusual food at the Garlic Festival was. Their answer was the same,
garlic ice cream.
By Aaron Carnes
I asked several different people what they thought the most unusual food at the Garlic Festival was. Their answer was the same, garlic ice cream.
Maybe I’m just used to it by now, but garlic ice cream didn’t strike me as all that weird at this point. Nonetheless, I headed over to the booth to get some of the infamous garlic ice cream. It had been a while since I’d had any.
It tasted like what I remembered, vanilla ice cream with a hint of garlic. It works for some unknown reason. I think it just sounds weirder than it actually is.
As the park was opening, people headed straight to the garlic ice cream stand, excited as can be. This is truly a Garlic Festival tradition.
I wandered around the nearby booths looking for my next unusual culinary treat. The choice was obvious, escargot.
The guy behind the “Enchanted Escargot” booth was excited to have my business. “Escargot! Breakfast of champions!” he said. “You are in for a real treat. This is the first batch of the day.”
He handed me a bowl of mushrooms and escargot. “I hope you like garlic. You have to like garlic in order to eat escargot,” he said.
Fortunately I do like garlic. How could I not? I grew up in Gilroy.
Aside from the garlic, the escargot was cooked in butter, parsley, shallots, white wine, and a bit of pepper. I had never eaten snails, but I always wanted to try some. People passing by the Enchanted Escargot booth were generally apprehensive. The escargot was sauteed in garlic and butter, but they were still snails.
They actually tasted a lot like mushrooms. They had a subtle meaty flavor, though it soaked up the flavor of the garlic and the seasoning more than anything. The texture of the escargot was spongy. The more snails I ate, the more I felt bothered by it. I’m sure I just needed some adjustment. Give me a week with nothing to eat but snails and I’ll be tossing them down my throat like French fries.
A few booths down they were selling garlic chocolate peanut butter cups at Mama Rap’s. Just like with the ice cream, the garlic seemed an odd spicy addition to an otherwise sweet, tasty treat. But unlike the ice cream, the garlic did nothing to help the chocolate peanut butter cup. It seemed more of a hindrance. The last thing you want to do when you’re eating candy is to pull pieces of garlic out of your teeth.
On the other side of the park, they were serving Crawdad Etoufee at the New Orleans Cajun Cooking booth. The guy behind the counter assured me that it was a very delicious dish, but I had my doubts, mostly due to the fact that it was cooked with crawdads.
They were served in a tomato based cream with vegetables and seasonings all on a bed of white rice. It wasn’t bad, but I had a tough time with the fishy taste of the crawdads. When you first sink your teeth into them, they taste like shrimp. But the aftertaste is like seawater that’s been marinated in Tabasco sauce.
The mother load of bizarre foods was still waiting for me. And they were all from one vendor, the Louisiana Cajun lady.
I ate some Cajun Crawdads from there years ago with my parents. They didn’t think there was anything weird at all about ripping open these bug-like monsters, eating their insides and tossing their shells aside like peanuts, but I did.
I tried it anyways, because I’m an open minded guy, but I did not care for it. It wasn’t just an issue of having my food staring back at me, the taste wasn’t for me. The crawdads in the etouufee weren’t that bad, so I gave them another shot. This time, not only did I order up some crawdads, but I also picked out other curious foods. My choices were kangaroo, frog legs and alligator meat.
I still didn’t care for the crawdads. But maybe I was the weird one. Everywhere I looked, people were chowing down on them, and loving every second of it.
I ate the frog leg next. I was always under the impression that frog legs tasted like chicken. I was wrong. They taste like fish. It was OK. They weren’t bad, but it was hard not to picture the rest of the frog hopping around on one foot.
Speaking of hopping around, I tried Kangaroo meat next. I couldn’t figure out though why the Louisiana Cajun Lady was serving Kangaroo. Last time I drove through New Orleans, I don’t remember seeing that many kangaroos, but maybe I wasn’t paying attention. The taste of the meat was real gamey. It was salty, chewy and hard to swallow. But at least it was served on a stick.
I saved the best for last. There’s nothing quite satisfying like eating the meat of an animal that could easily kill you. I am referring to Alligator, a meat that in fact does taste like chicken. The only major difference is the texture, a mushier meat than chicken. It reminded me of the fattier portion of the chicken, the juicy part you save for last.
By the end of the day, I had eaten a lot of different foods, but there was so much garlic everywhere, everything ended up just tasting like garlic. Even a banana bought from the grocery store on the drive home. Garlic banana. Hmmmm … now I have an idea for a booth next year at the Garlic Festival 2011.
