Ken, this should give you a chuckle -- about 1/3 of the garlic that i've been planting has been softneck, Western Rose and Polish, with the other 2/3 being hardneck varieties (Music and an unknown variety that was shared with me by a friend quite a few years ago, he had no idea what it was). I've been using essentially all of the softneck type to make my garlic powder, because I like the larger hardneck cloves for cooking, less hassle with peeling so many cloves and whatnot. So, it seems I've been using all the garlic first that would actually keep the longest... might have to modify that system this year!!
I've never even tried the "elephant garlic," but did know it was related to onions or shallots and not a true garlic. Supermarkets don't offer much in the way of teaching, but it would be kind of nice if the sellers at farmer's markets would do so! The Chinese Pink garlic is offered in quite a few seed catalogs -- last night I was looking at the Territorial Seeds catalog to see if there was anything else that I wanted to order for the garden, and happened to see that they sell it; it's supposed to be an extra-early-maturing softneck.
I'm definitely not from California, but I love sourdough, too! I've been experimenting with baking it for the last couple of years, and finally think I've gotten the knack of it -- took me a while to actually grasp the fact that the dough would take much longer to rise than I'm used to when using yeast -- like 12 or more hours for the first rise (as compared to about 1 hour with yeast). Being able to maintain a starter and not have to depend on commercial yeast kind of appeals to me -- and it makes great pancakes as well.
