It's taken a long time for garlic to become accepted in the English
speaking world. Mrs Beeton in her famous Victorian cookbook said:
"the smell of this plant is generally considered offensive, and
it is the most acrimonious in its taste." Things have certainly
changed for the better since then.
Buying Garlic for Cooking
When buying garlic for cooking, avoid being tempted by the very large
elephant garlic. Although this looks wonderful the taste is not at all
the same and it is no substitute for ordinary garlic.
Always look for heads that are firm with plenty of dry, papery covering.
Heads that are showing signs of sprouting are past their prime and were
probably not dried properly. Garlic that is very old will crumble under
a gentle pressure from the fingers.
As with all ingredients for cooking, buy the best garlic you can afford.
I always recommend organic garlic
if at all possible.
Storing Garlic
I've added a separate page on storing garlic. Please read
the warnings page.
Preparing Garlic
Remember that a single bulb of garlic usually contains between ten
and twenty individual cloves of garlic. Individual cloves are
covered with a fine pinkish/purple skin. The head of cloves is then covered with white papery
outer skin. Don't confuse cloves and bulbs! Neither the inner nor outer skins should
be eaten.
To prepare garlic, first strip off some of the papery covering from the
bulb. Now ease out as many cloves as required. Garlic cloves come in a wide
variety of sizes, so the numbers given in a recipe should be treated as
a rough guide only. Once you get used to cooking with garlic you will
probably find yourself using more than the recipe states.
In general with garlic, the finer the chop the stronger the taste.
Crushed garlic has the strongest taste of all and if used raw is only
for the real aficionado. When cooked whole garlic has a much milder,
rather sweet taste. There is a famous recipe "chicken with forty cloves
of garlic". It should go without saying that these are whole garlic cloves not
crushed!
Garlic also mellows the longer it is cooked. Garlic added at the end of
cooking will give a stronger taste than garlic prepared the same way but added
earlier.
Garlic is, of course, known for causing unpleasant smelling breath.
Chewing raw parsley is reputed to assist this condition and many garlic
recipes contain this.
If you don't mind getting your hands messy then crushing garlic
manually is easy and satisfying. All you need is a good
knife and a little salt.
To help you I've provided how to
crush garlic - a photographic guide.
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