With fuel prices on the rise it may take more than your average airport-restaurant omelet or hamburger to entice your airplane out of the hangar. How about some award-winning scampi? An ear of garlic-dipped corn?
Maybe a garlic-laced pepper steak sandwich? Perhaps a dip of garlic-flavored ice cream? Garlic ice cream? Yep. If you're hungry for something unique, pencil in the weekend of July 25 through 27 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Gilroy Garlic Festival.
Where?
Gilroy, in Santa Clara County south of San Jose, was incorporated in 1870 and has since grown to more than 41,000 residents. The association between Gilroy and garlic is believed to have originated with the Japanese farmers who arrived following World War I, bringing their garlic farming skills with them.
You'll find the town of Gilroy on Highway 101 at the southern tip of the Silicon Valley on the San Francisco Sectional, but if the wind's blowing just right you won't need a chart to find it. Chances are good that as you've flown between South County Airport of Santa Clara County in San Martin and Hollister Municipal Airport you've noticed a pungent odor in the air. Even in solid IMC a quick sniff will often help you verify GILRO Intersection. For 51 weeks a year those fields of garlic and onions nourish the community, and in late July the community gives something back. Organizers began the three-day festival in 1979 to celebrate the end of the garlic harvest and to raise funds for local nonprofit groups. It has grown each year, and last year about 4,000 volunteers donated their time to raise more than $250,000 for the charity of their choice. The festival has raised more than $5 million since 1979.
The fun begins on Friday afternoon with the crowning of Miss Gilroy — the Belle of the Bulb — and celebrity chefs giving cooking classes. This year's Friday roster includes Gloria and Michael Melone (the widow and son of festival founder Dr. Rudy Malone), Narsai David of Narsai's in Berkeley, Evelyn Miliate of Raley's & Nob Hill Foods, and chef J.R. Bruski.
Saturday morning begins with the annual Great Garlic Cookoff. Each December the festival committee asks amateur chefs around North America to share their favorite garlic recipes. Judges choose from hundreds of entries — soups to nuts and everything in between — and pick eight finalists. Those eight are invited to Gilroy to prepare their recipes, and the winner is chosen by celebrity chefs on Saturday. The winner goes home with $1,000 and bragging rights. (Here's the link if you'd like to submit a recipe for next year's festival: www.gilroygarlicfestival.com/pages/cookoff-enter.html)
You'll want to sample the winning recipes, but you'll probably spend most of your time in Gourmet Alley, where chefs from the Bay Area's finest restaurants offer bite-size samples of their latest garlic concoctions. That's where you'll find scampi, calamari, pasta con pesto, and a festival favorite, the pepper steak sandwich. Last year Gourmet Alley served 15,589 pepper steak sandwiches.
After your trip through Gourmet Alley you can stroll through a field full of booths featuring other interesting garlic recipes, such as garlic sushi, garlic wine, garlic beef sandwiches, garlic almonds, garlic pistachios, freeze-dried garlic, garlic hot dogs, garlic candy, and another festival favorite, garlic ice cream. Truth be told, once you've taken your palate down Gourmet Alley, the shock potential of garlic ice cream and garlic sushi is diminished — but it's no less tasty. At the official Gilroy Garlic Festival store you can load up on kitchen supplies, garlic braids, cooking oils, and choose from hundreds of garlic cookbooks. In addition to the annual Belle of the Bulb contest, the festival hosts a logo design contest for local graphic artists. You'll find those logos on shirts, cups, aprons, and posters — just in case you're decorating a kitchen. Just a short walk from the store you'll find another field with artwork by local craftspeople — painters, potters, glaziers, and photographers selling their wares.
All day long the cookoff stage features cooking classes by the chefs of Gourmet Alley. Not only are the chefs trying to outdo each other's recipes, but also they seem to delight in revealing the kind of garlic history worthy of a Jeopardy category. Here are some garlic factoids: Garlic's formal scientific name is allium sativum; the Egyptians fed garlic to the slaves who built the Pyramids to increase their strength and endurance; garlic is biologically inert until you slice, heat, or chew it; garlic lowers blood pressure by blocking the body's production of angiotensen I-converting enzyme (ACE); glutathiones-transferase is an enzyme in raw garlic that helps the liver detoxify carcinogens...and the bulb will chase away vampires.
Saturday's full-day and Sunday's half-day schedules feature more cooking demos by Bay Area chefs. This year Andrea Froncillo from San Francisco's Stinking Rose restaurant will add her expertise. The festival wraps up around 4 p.m. on Sunday, so chances are you can have the airplane home and back in the hangar by dark.
Gilroy doesn't have an airport and, oddly, AJO — the Spanish word for garlic — is the identifier for Corona Municipal Airport, miles away in Los Angeles' Inland Empire. But you have two excellent choices. If you're arriving from the Bay Area or points north, you'll probably want to land at South County (a.k.a. San Martin) Airport. It's a nontowered, 3,100-foot lighted runway in Class E airspace with a GPS approach to Runway 32. There's lots of transient parking, rental cars, self-service fuel, and a great collection of antique aircraft at the Wings of History Museum.
If you're arriving from the southern half of the state, you'll probably want to land at Hollister Municipal Airport — the theory being that most of the festival's inbound auto traffic comes down the 101 from the Bay Area, and if you fly to South County Airport you'll join them. Hollister has two lighted runways with a GPS approach to Runway 31 (see " California Flying: Jets and Jennys at Hollister," October 2002 Pilot). Depending on how you'd like to arrange other activities, Watsonville and Salinas also may be good choices for transient parking and auto rental.
The festival charges $10 for adults, $5 for children ages 6 to 12, and those over 60 or under 6 are free for a day visit. You can buy tickets at the gate or ahead of time at the festival's Web site ( www.gilroygarlicfestival.com/pages/tickets.html). There are lots of hotels in the area but they fill up early. Gilroy's visitor site can help ( www.gilroyvisitor.org).
Saturday and Sunday are the big crowd days. Last year, 125,000 hungry palates visited the festival, and — this being the silver anniversary — crowds are expected to be at least that large. But Gilroy's prepared for it. The town's huge Christmas Hill Park serves as festival grounds. Free parking is nearby with free buses to shuttle you to the festival gate. The crowd can be intimidating, but remember that once you're inside, the garlic helps lower your blood pressure and cholesterol levels. July in Gilroy can be hot, so bring sunscreen. And if you're flying in anything smaller than a cabin-class twin, toss in a package of breath mints for the trip home.
