One of the pleasures of shopping at the farmers market is learning which products are truly superior to supermarket stuff and which offer only the advantage of good karma. For some reason, although I love kale and fennel, I love supermarket kale and fennel better than any I’ve bought at a market stall.

But many things are just absurdly superior. Carrots. Peppers. Melons. Garlic. The latter shows one of the greatest gaps. Supermarket garlic, even in season (which is summer to early fall), is often sprouted and always hard to peel. (That said, it’s worth checking the organic garlic at the supermarket, which is often in better shape.) But market garlic? Where do you want to start? There are a dozen different kinds, and many of them are hardneck garlic.

You can recognize hardneck garlic by the hard stalk sticking out of the middle of the head. Most varieties have a single layer of large cloves surrounding the stalk, and the skin is usually purple. There would be good reason to use this garlic even if it didn’t taste any better: it’s much easier to peel and it rarely has those annoying useless tiny cloves. But it does taste better. And to seal the deal, it’s much less likely to be sprouted. I read recently that this is because small farmers tend not to chill their garlic, and it’s the chilling and warming cycle that causes garlic to sprout. I don’t know if this is accurate, but I’m passing on the rumor.

The best-known variety of hardneck garlic is Rocambole, and it’s become synonymous with the type, but there are many other varieties. If you do see garlic labeled Rocambole, by all means go for it.

I’m currently reading Michael Ruhlman’s new book, The Reach of a Chef, which would be a great title for a book about sexual harassment in the restaurant kitchen but is actually, well, it’s basically a book about some chefs that Ruhlman likes. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. One of the chefs is Melissa Kelly of Primo, in Maine. Kelly is my kind of chef, a real Blood, one who employs a full-time gardener that keeps the place supplied with 60 percent of its produce. Among this produce is hardneck garlic, but this isn’t the term Ruhlman uses. He’s bestowed a different name, one which I will enthusiastically adopt.

He calls it hard-core garlic.