Our Five Best Proven Garlic Tips
Garlic is an essential ingredient in all cuisines, but due to its sticky and odorous nature, it is difficult to peel and grind. To make your life a little easier – and hopefully less sticky – we’ve rounded up our most popular garlic tips and carefully rated each one.
Rule changes: Microwave garlic to make it even easier to peel
The old science oven gives us a lot of gifts (like mug cakes and homemade potato chips ), but now it has given us another one in the form of super peeled garlic. According to NPR’s food blog The Salt, when you put a bunch of garlic cloves in the microwave for just fifteen seconds, water is released in the form of steam, freeing the skin of the pulp.
This was fairly easy to verify; I just microwaved about five cloves and cooked them for 15 seconds. They clapped, hissed and jumped a little, but remained intact. Once they were cool enough to be handled, I was able to carefully remove the skins with very little effort on my part. They fell seriously at the slightest jerk.
Although microwaving the garlic deactivates some of its enzymes – just like blanching – I did not notice any difference in taste or aroma, except for my finger scent, which was noticeably less garlic than usual after processing this amount. garlic. I give this tip 10 out of 10 cloves.
A reliable classic: Peel a whole head of garlic in two bowls (or a jar or cocktail shaker)
If you’ve ever read only one “culinary trick” in your life, then it was probably the ultra-popular “quickly peel a whole head of garlic using some kind of airtight system.” You can use two bowls (as shown above), a cocktail shaker, or a jar – you just need some kind of enclosed environment for the light bulb to bang. I usually don’t bother with this method if I only have a couple of cloves to peel, as mashing them with the flat side of a chef’s knife is fine , but if you want a whole onion of hot onions, this tip can really save you time.
I don’t actually have two bowls that are the same size in my kitchen – except for the soup bowls, but they aren’t big enough – and I don’t like it when my cocktail shaker is completely overwhelmed, so I decided to check this tip with an empty marinade can. …
As the video above promises us, after about 15 seconds, the outer, paper-covered skin fell off, and all the cloves detached from the base of the bulb. About fifty percent of the cloves came out completely peeled, so I tossed the more stubborn guys back into the jar and shake them for another 15 seconds. After about half a minute of shaking, almost all of the cloves were bared and any remaining, very stubborn pieces of skin could be easily removed. This tip yields 9 out of 10 cups of aioli.
Decent, albeit not perfect, shortcut: Quickly cook fried garlic in a skillet
The fried garlic is amazing. Its creamy, soft, caramelized, slightly pungent flavor works wonders with almost any dish, be it mashed potatoes, chopping it into guac, or simply spreading it on bread. This is not difficult to do; All you have to do is cut off the top of the onion, sprinkle with olive oil, wrap in foil and bake in a 400 degree oven for 45 minutes. But we don’t always have 45 minutes, and a cast iron skillet can give you a pretty good approximation of fried garlic in literally a third of the time.
Like any good advice, this one is pretty easy to follow. Just toss as many unpeeled cloves as you like in a cast iron skillet over medium heat – you don’t even need oil – and let them dangle until the skins turn black, turning them over from time to time to cook evenly. on all sides.
Given the fact that I am poor at planning – and, for some reason, I am constantly losing foil – I have actually used this advice many times since I first wrote about it. The resulting garlic is not as sweet as real roasted garlic, but it has a surprisingly mild brownish flavor with good depth in just fifteen minutes of cooking.
I don’t spread it on bread, but it’s a perfectly acceptable substitute if garlic is for sauces, sauces, or anything else where roasted garlic is more flavor than the main ingredient. I put 7 bulbs out of 10.
Meh technique, I think it works: when chopping garlic, sprinkle with salt so that it does not stick to the knife
Because of its stickiness, garlic can sometimes be difficult to chop. It likes to cling to the blade, which is not the end of the world, but it does result in a decent scratch throughout the grinding process. A light sprinkle of salt on a cutting board will not only help bring out the flavor and soften the harsh, pungent bite of the garlic , but it will also seem to make slicing much easier by reducing the sticking factor.
To test the adhesion properties of sodium chloride, I chopped two garlic cloves, one sprinkled with salt and one uncoated. As you can see from the adjacent photos below, there is not much difference in the amount of garlic stuck to the knife. I noticed that the unsalted cloves started sticking to the knife a little earlier, but the difference didn’t last long.
Unfortunately, salt does not help with stickage, but it does not help draw out moisture and break down the cell walls of the garlic, resulting in a smooth paste, and a pile of individual garlic bits.
So while it doesn’t get high marks for keeping garlic out of the knife, it’s still worth trying and I give this tip 6 out of 10 garlic shrimp.
The only thing to avoid is “frying” the garlic in a pressure cooker.
Look, you know that I’m a big fan of the pressure cooker and the many great things you can do with it , but I’ve identified one thing that you definitely shouldn’t be cooking is ” fried garlic .”
The idea is that by placing a whole head of garlic in a pressure cooker for ten minutes and then finishing it for five minutes, you get soft, toasted, caramelized garlic in just fifteen minutes. This is a great idea, but I didn’t get the results I was hoping for. The garlic was definitely soft and spread well – in fact, it was almost mushy – but five minutes under the fry wasn’t enough to develop all of the fried, toasted, caramelized flavors you get from the Maillard reaction . Basically, I ended up with a soft garlic that was still raw, with tiny toasted chunks at the tips of some of the chunks. In short, it was unattractive and I give him 1 in 10 garlic salt shakers.
That’s it: really good, decent and just plain soft. However, if we’ve learned a thing or two from all of this, then while you can use shortcuts to make peeling and preparing garlic easier, nothing replaces real fried garlic, so plan your life accordingly.