This is pretty much my go to. If a recipe calls for 1 clove, u know that person is wrong.
Once I had a recipe call for half a clove. Half. A. Clove. If you don’t like garlic why put it in the recipe!
My wife: “Those are rookie numbers”
Are you secretly married to my sister? I just sent her this picture and that was her exact response.
Is this referring to the standard quadrupling, or does it mean to quadruple the standard quadrupling?
Either way, needs more garlic.
Story time.
When my wife and I were dating and in high school, she decided to cook a meal for her parents. She found a recipe for some kind of baked penne.
My wife’s family weren’t terribly familiar with making Italian food. They are Pennsylvania Dutch, and her mother wasn’t all that interested in cooking. The only garlic my wife ever saw growing up was garlic powder. This was her first time cooking with real garlic. Her mother never bothered because it was too much work.
My wife (well, girlfriend at the time) called me up to tell me she understood why her mother never used real garlic. She said the recipe called for one clove, and “it took forever to peel all those little things”.
I had to explain to her that each of those little things were the cloves. What she added to the recipe wasn’t one clove of garlic. It was the entire bulb.
There must have been vampires just dropping out of the sky over their house that night.
The smartest thing my dad did in his life was marry my mom. Luckily for me, my wife found inspiration in my mother’s cooking. The whole reason she wanted to make the recipe she made was because she wanted to learn to cook like my mom. Over the years she learned my mom’s recipes (lots of ethnic food: Italian, Slavic, Greek, Jewish, etc.).
She is still a big fan of garlic, although she doesn’t typically include an entire bulb in the recipe.
My MIL did something similar in a soup.
Gotta say, I fucking loved that soup. Had to sleep on the couch for a few days, was 100% worth it.
Garlic bread? No, no, sweetie. Breaded garlic.
Fried individual cloves, like cheese curds
Never trust a recipe, you measure garlic with the heart!
4 cloves, pfffft. 4 HEADS of garlic.
Quadruple? And you call yourself a garlic lover. Poseur.
Exactly. There is little reason to live without garlic. And the more the better!
If you have ingredients other than garlic you do not have enough garlic
Still needs more garlic.
What causes this? As pungent as garlic is, why is there never enough in the dish, no matter how much I add?
As far as I understand it, the flavor and smell of garlic that we experience is made of mostly volatile compounds that get broken down with heat. So the longer garlic is cooked the less of that pungent smell and flavor is in your final dish. So if you want more garlic flavor in your dishes, you can add it later in the cooking process.
Do you use powder, minced or fresh? Previous two the fix is just to use more but with fresh it’s a little more finicky. When you’re mincing your fresh garlic cut it a bunch of times, add some kosher salt and just scrape and mush everything together with your knife. Garlic flavor comes from the compounds locked behind the cell walls so you’ve got to breach as many of those cell walls as possible if you want max garlic flavor.
Also as the other guy said heat will also denature the garlic flavor quite a bit so if you want that super sharp fresh garlic taste then it needs to be hot as little as possible.
Stop giving my fiancee ideas. I’m fucking Italian and even I think she overdoes it.
I’m fucking Italian and even I think she overdoes it.
🤌
Another good idealist to leave the garlic bigger or cook the garlic less than most recipes state.
I make a shrimp dish that layers all the flavors. Slivers of almost burnt, chunks of well cooked, and slivers of near raw at the end. I love garlic.
Sounds awesome. I’m also a fan of garlic confit and black garlic. Have you tried those?
Never had confit but I do like black garlic.
Garlic is a pain to peel but the more you peel the more worth it it becomes. No pain, no gain.
If a recipe calls for one clove and you peel just one clove then you will hardly taste it. If a recipe calls for one clove and you peel and mince four, then now you can taste it and now it was worth it.
If you put pressure on the garlic cloves before peeling then the dry skin will fall off, and the remaining peeling will be very easy. I achieve that by rolling the garlic cloves several times on a hard surface under hard pressure from my hands. Another method with nearly similar results is putting the garlic cloves in a container (empty marmalade jar) and shaking that container vigorously. I prefer the rolling as it works faster and more reliable.
Applies to onions, too, by the way although they need less pressure.
I know the tricks, I’ve been peeling garlic for decades. There’s just something really satisfying about thin, visible slices of garlic in some recipes though.
the shaker method is the absolute game changer if you are peeling a lot at once
