Beemster Garlic

Who's behind it

Beemster Garlic is the business of the Kruiswijk family on Rijperweg in the Beemster. They started in 1986 when milk quotas put pressure on dairy farming and opened space to try something new. That turned out to be garlic, a crop almost no one grew at scale in the Netherlands. They started small, with a handful of cloves in the backyard, and needed about fifteen years to harvest commercially good garlic under Dutch conditions. Today they plant millions of cloves per season, with their own self-built peeling machine and a GPS-guided planter that sets six rows in the ground at once.

Why this garlic

The heavy clay of the drained Beemster gives the bulbs a full, mild flavor, rounder than the sharp Mediterranean garlic most kitchens run on. Kruiswijk plants in November and harvests around June and July. A plot gets garlic again only after at least seven years, which keeps the soil clean and healthy. Their investment in cold storage stretched the sales season from six weeks to nine months. So Dutch garlic is available from June through March, and in February it comes out of storage looking freshly harvested. The business is the first certified Dutch garlic grower under the SMK certification mark. Besides the dried bulb, they deliver the fresh bulb with green stem during season, plus purée and black garlic from their own harvest.

In your kitchen

On your menu you can name the grower and the polder. Put the fresh bulb with stem on in summer as a seasonal product. Its mild flavor means you can use it raw as well. Outside the season, use the purée and the black garlic for your mise en place, from the same Beemster harvest.