I am not really sure if it is due to surface area directly, but more with the number of garlic cells being crushed, causing the potent component to be released in defense.
You also need to cook 2,3 in this state, or you just crush all the cells in your mouth and end up with 4.
A friend of mine (from Palestine) taught me another trick with garlic: mince the garlic, then generously sprinkle it with coriander powder and mash it all together with a fork. Add to a dish (like a sauce or a stew) when it’s already mostly cooked, just at the end. It has a pretty intense flavor and is really yummy.
Proof! Except the results have almost nothing to do with surface area and everything with chemical reactions and compositions. :D
Pickled garlic=Even sweeter.
“Hot” is a strange way to describe something without capsaicin. I’d go with sharp, or maybe at a stretch I could possibly see spicy.
Ive seen “piquant” used to refer to this kind of heat. Like what horseradish brings.
This is also partially due to more cells in the garlic being crushed and the intracellular compounds reacting with things on the outside.
It’s also important to note that allicin breaks down with time, acid, or the application of heat.
Another note here, it takes time for the allicin to form. So your maximum flavor is about 10-15 minutes after crushing the garlic. After that, you start losing flavor.
That said, allicin is only one of many flavors. And different preparations can highlight those flavors. A rich tomato sauce that has simmered for hours is elevated with garlic, but fresh garlic is a waste. Use jarred or even powdered (soaked in room temp water for a few minutes first) and it will taste much the same.
Food science is probably my favorite science
It is the tastiest science. Now, I have not personally tested that statement for every science, but I have licked a lot of things over the years.
Licking things to see how they taste is the essence of science.
Girl BoyScientist dinner
You see those influencers doing fresh garlic into ice cube trays, well I found those at one of the grocery stores, now I buy those, because they are perfect for long cooked tomato sauces, you can add a lot of garlic to those and I absolutely despise the stickyness of fresh garlic when you peel it, well no more of that for me, I just take out one or two or let’s be honest, 4 cubes of frozen garlic and use that in those recipes.
If you want to make your own version. There are a couple tricks. Take an entire head of garlic, place it on a solid surface and crush it with the heal of your palm. Then throw the entire mess into a mason jar, or even two matching bowls closed up. Then shake the piss out of it for 10-30 seconds.
Then dump the contents and pick out the fully pealed garlic.
Then just finely chop or crush the garlic and put it into an ice cube tray. You can then add a thin layer of olive oil to help cut the freezer burn, or just cover the tray.
A food processor and a spoon can also be used to keep from touching the garlic juice.
Yeah, but Goodfellas said to mince and slice for tomato sauce
Vegetables are trying to kill us so we won’t eat them
One of the carnivore doctors (Dr Anthony Chaffey, I think) does a presentation named plants are trying to kill us. The central idea is to eat only meat because you can’t overeat it, you can’t poison yourself with meat. But plants don’t have teeth, claws, hooves or horns, they use poison
Eat them raw and you can taste their screams
Or are they trying to be so delicious that we cultivate, spread, and ultimately keep their species alive?
No, they were trying to kill all the mammals but failed successfully because naked apes love mildly toxic substances for some reason and started mass reproducing them instead.
Humans prefer pain to boredom, on average. I remember reading about a study where subjects were left alone in a room with a button that shocks themselves (they were warned what it does) and they would eventually shock themselves just because there’s nothing else in the room.
Maybe I should get a self-shocking device.
Make sure it has a flared base. Just in case.
I wonder if there were two buttons, one for the shock, and another which gives them something more rewarding. I wonder how fast or slow they give up on the more rewarding response because that too becomes boring. I suppose like a song that sounds great at first but you hate it after x times
This reminds me of the time we went to SanFran for a conference and 30 of us all went to the Stinking Rose (a notorious garlic overload restaurant) for dinner then all took the same red eye back home.
The smell on that plane was causing complaints from passengers.
Misread this as you all went back home with pinkeye from the restaurant
You just brightened my day. That was one of my favorite restaurants in LA until it closed, and now I’ll have another chance next time I go north!
Did they know it was you? Or did you sheepingly pretend to also be annoyed at the smell
They didn’t know who exactly, but it was literally 30 out of 150 so VERY INTENSE and pervasive. You can’t localize it.
“Oh god, honey, you would not believe. The plane smelled like 30 people farted all at once!”
Obviously this is proof that garlic can sense your aggression and react with anger.
So how do you eat 1️⃣? Just swallow it whole?
The people who say roast it and eat it are correct, but if you’re lazy like me, a much easier way is to throw a whole head in with your meal (usually it’s rice for me) and cook it with it. Once it’s done, it’ll easily break apart and you can just squeeze the garlic out. Depending on how long it was cooked, it ranges from a paste consistency to being a bit mushy while still retaining its shape. Can’t get enough of it!
Oh, it’s amazing. Get a head of garlic and rub off all the exterior papery stuff (but not the skin of the individual cloves. Some people also cut the pointy tips off. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast until soft. Get some nice bread, warm bread. Pull off a clove, hold it by the bottom and squeeze it like toothpaste onto a slice of bread. Enjoy the most wonderful garlic bread variant.
You can also make black garlic, and it becomes fairly sweet
Huh, interesting, hadn’t seen that.
👃
No joke - my wife and I were eating so much of it for a while that you could smell it on our sweat.
Also, what they say is true: we got zero mosquito bites during that time.
Just grab a tiny fork and go to town.
Roasted bulb - squeeze on crusty bread. (Or just squirt in face)
Sliced - pan fried and pasta
Diced - chimmichuri
Puréed - snort uncut, or soup.
I have yet to find a chimmichuri recipe I like. I want it to be garlic, mint, cilantro and lime heavy. I forget what else. Maybe peppers?
Garlic, parsley, olive oil, red wine vinegar and a very small chilli and salt.
a fresh chilli or a dried one? the research i’m finding says fresno peppers
Fresh, but the kind doesn’t matter much. I use Bird’ Eye.
Aw fuck yeah I get half gallon jars of pickled bird eye chilis to make this tomato garlic chili dipping sauce for, well, everything but mostly pizza bones.
that’s… one way in.
I… suppose?
Mush it with Butter.
I prefer chewing it till it becomes something between #3 and #4
I interpreted that as for soups and stews. Peel the clove and plop it in. Once the cooking is done, take it out, like you would do with a bay leaf.
I personally would never use garlic that way. I absolutely put it crushed into my stews. But that’s how I read the image.
You would still need to crush the cloves first if you want them to impart much garlic flavor. Tossing them in whole doesn’t release much oil at all.
True, I’ve seen a helpful post about it here.
I think this is just fried together with whatever it is you’re seasoning. The idea is that the taste dissolves in the fat and carries over to the steak, for instance. The garlic is then taken out before serving.
I don’t think this infographic makes sense then. If it’s cooked, then it should go the other way around. For the same cooking time, finely minced would give you milder flavours while larger pieces maintain more of the pungency.
Keeping an aquarium teaches you this, also, especially saltwater.
Why are you keeping garlic in an aquarium? They’re terrestrial pets.
Funny you should ask…
How Much Garlic to Put in Aquarium for Healthier Fish and Effective Parasite Control
Oh wow
… What?
Aquariums use mechanical, chrmical, and biological filtration in a cycle to keep the water clean. Surface area matters, especially the biological part, because it provides more space for beneficial bacteria to colonize so they can break down waste.
You put garlic in an aquarium? Is this to stop the vampire fish
Not regularly, but I posted a link in another comment: it helps fish health and with parasites.
My comment was related surface area and bio-filtration in aquarium keeping because surface area is important there.
This is why it’s smart to use a blend. People ask why I have both powedered and granualted garlic and it’s because the size of the grain affects the taste and to get the best taste, it’s a good idea to use all 3: Fresh garlic cut the way you want, powder and granulated. It’s so much more robust than just using only 1.
It’s also why powdered sugar is a better topping (like for strawberries) than granulated sugar.
I have to agree and think this is really underappreciated. People hypercorrected from “powdered garlic is a terrible substitute for fresh garlic” to “you should only ever use fresh garlic”. They taste different and sometimes you will benefit from using powdered or granulated.
Agreed! They taste different and have different applications. Minced fresh garlic is not for a dry rub, and I’m not gonna confit garlic powder (or should I? Lolol)
Garlic salt sprinkled on the crust of my pizzas before baking makes up for the fact that I can’t bake for shit.
In my youth I watched a TV chef explain that mushing garlic is bad because it would taste too strong. They (don’t quote me on this) either sliced it or used it whole. But then half a bulb. 🤦
“Surface area, Jerry!”
I would argue that the surface area of paste is less than the surface area of minced.
Ok, so you’d argue incorrectly?
Using a garlic press or a mortar+pestle by FAR exposes more surface area and expresses more oil and aromatics.
Not sure how you can think that flat, cut surfaces on the exterior of undisturbed interior areas can somehow have less surface area than an amorphous blob of crushed matter.
How in the world is this upvoted
Only if you think of the mound of paste as the thing you’re measuring. If you’re measuring pieces of garlic obviously it’s much higher.
Alternatively, just spread the paste really thin.
Mincing releases more garlic oil, I guess that’s why it’s the strongest tasting.
I would love if recipe writers could form a consensus on what the terms “minced” or “crushed” mean when it comes to garlic.
Sometimes “minced” means finely chopped, while other times it means as a paste.
Some recipes use “crushed” to mean the paste, while other times that means to squash a clove with the flat of your knife so it cracks and the oil runs, but still leave whole.
You can normally work it out from context, but it really keeps you guessing.
Minced always means very very finely chopped. That’s a mince; it’s a preparation technique, not necessarily just for garlic.
Crushing, at least in the context of garlic, generally means using a garlic press (most common in western cooking) or using a mortar and pestle. You can also crush with the side of a knife, bottom of a glass, etc but that’s a pretty rare method because you’ll usually end up with large globs or chunks and it’s very likely that people will get big ass mouthfuls of garlic, which most people don’t like (I do like, but most don’t)
I can’t think of a time when I’ve seen a serious recipe call for crushing garlic in an uncontrolled manner like with the side of a knife. If you find a recipe that does so, just assume they mean to squeeze it in a press, unless in your judgement the recipe benefits from big clumps of garlic (mashed potatoes is a good example imo).
But yeah, it’s either mince or press, if the recipe is unclear. I usually just press no matter what because I love garlic flavor and it’s easier than a mince - not because the cutting is hard necessarily, but because it’s extra cleaning of the knife, your hands, and cutting board takes more time. Easier to just rinse the press and toss it in the dishwasher.
Slicing is different, as is roasting the cloves.
I’ve been reading recipes for decades and have never encountered this problem.
