Bagna càuda, one of the classic dishes of the Piedmont region in northwestern Italy, is a potent dip made from warm olive oil loaded with tons of garlic and anchovies, all cooked together until melted down.
So how did these salty little fish become so central to Piedmontese cooking? Theories abound, but the most likely one has to do with salt itself. Once a valuable commodity, salt was heavily taxed along its trade routes. To skirt those taxes, some merchants began packing their salt under layers of salted anchovies—if a government agent cracked open the barrel, they'd see the anchovies and wave them through without demanding the salt tax.
Even though you're unlikely to see an anchovy cart on a road in Piedmont today, the region's cuisine was forever changed, and anchovies now have a permanent, and critically important, place at the table. If any dish should represent this peculiar history, it's bagna càuda. Anchovies alone would be inedibly salty, though, so they have to be cut with something, and bagna càuda goes on the offense here, too. It blends one of the sea's most assertive flavors with one of the most pungent of the earth—garlic, and lots of it. They cook down together in olive oil until they form a thick mash whose components can't be teased apart, by sight or taste.Bagna càuda has only three critical ingredients: the anchovies, the garlic, and the olive oil.
None of my blind-tasters could tell a difference between batches with and without the germ, a sign that it's not as important as some people claim. Though I should add that my garlic didn't have a very developed, green germ, so I can't rule out that, in those cases, there may be some benefit to pulling it out. Still, I wouldn't worry about it too much.
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