The Hudson Valley Garlic Festival, a harvest celebration honoring garlic’s benefits to health and palate both, has been going strong since its 1989 inception at Pat Reppert’s herb farm, Shale Hill Farm and Herb Gardens. The first year only 100 guests showed up, but the next year attendance quadrupled. By 1992 it had moved to Cantine Field, and Reppert bequeathed the festival to the local Kiwanis Club, which was equipped to handle and organize the large crowds of garlic devotees and would funnel profits into benefiting the community. The first year at Cantine Field attracted 5,000 attendees; by 2007 there were 53,000.
I’ve gone more times than I can count, and my favorite part is raw garlic tasting: little chips and slices of around 60 varieties of local, natural, mostly hardneck garlic, all for sale, with little tastes to compare. Some are pure white, some blushed with purple; some heads diminutive, some grand. Some are milder and some are spicy; some start innocuously enough but quickly develop in your mouth into something tongue-searing. I always get a big assortment to keep me in garlic heaven though the winter.
Of course, garlic foods abound. I’ve had some amazing pulled pork at the Festival, and I (and everyone else and their mother) love the sautéed mushrooms. The line can get dauntingly long. Offerings vary a bit year to year, but you may find garlic soup in a variety of versions, lots of garlicky sausages, garlic corn, garlic fish, garlic fries, garlic calamari, garlic pizza, garlic ravioli, garlic shrimp scampi, garlic fried dough, garlic Italian ice and garlic ice cream, which is a lot better than it sounds. It has a sweet roasted-garlic thing going on that really works.
