Boy, does it! A family friend told me once that while she and her husband had agreed to trade off the duty of cooking dinner every night, when it was her turn, she often felt exhausted or uninspired; her solution was to just start sauteing a handful of garlic. Her logic: the fantastic smell would sometimes give her an idea of what to do with it, and if not, at least the house smelled wonderful and gave everyone an appetite! My husband has tried this a few times and attests that it works. I like to just stand over the pan and inhale…
Heh. We used to eat at this amazing little Italian restaurant where the owner would come by and chat about what you wanted for dinner. One night we overheard him talking about his fabulous garlic bread with another customer. The customer expressed the sentiment that he’d be smelling of garlic for days afterwards. The owner replied:
“Well, sure, but what else would you rather smell like?”
If you’re used to eating items flavored with garlic powder/garlic salt, you may be surprised to find that the real item can be far milder. I know that when I eat an industrially-made item like frozen pizza or canned soup, I can taste the rancid, uber-strong garlic powder flavor for a day or two. The fresh stuff, though it smells powerful raw, is far more subtle after it is sauteed and mixed into the spaghetti sauce or whatever. And the statement that a whole clove of garlic is very inoffensive after long simmering is correct. I’ve made “Chicken With Forty Cloves of Garlic”, and the numerous whole cloves are mild and mushy after the lengthy cooking. Yummy!
[hijack]You other Doper cooks out there - those microplaner graters are awesome for grating a garlic clove. It creates a super-fine garlic paste which can be quickly stirred into some soft butter for garlic bread or mixed with microplaned ginger root to go into your Asian stir-frys and curries.[/end hijack]
You beat me to it. I do the same thing only I have a garlic slicer that slices them into thin slices. I saute them in olive oil and then take a wooden spoon and wipe the surface of the pan with them before discarding.
I hate and I mean hate biting into junks of garlic. I don’t care how long they’ve been cooking.
Definitely re-read teela’s comment above this one, it rings extremely true. If you like the garlic flavor on pizza, the garlic flavor of a whole clove stewing in a sauce will honestly be about 1/100th as powerful.
And questions about garlic are most definitely *not *dumb. They taste entirely different if you cut them different ways, ferchrissake. People new to different flavors or cooking for themselves would never know something like that, especially if a little leary of being adventurous.
Definitely true. Closest I can think of is the difference between the flavor of orange peel and orange fruit: fresh garlic, like the fruit flesh, is less acrid (at least when cooked).
Another suggestion for getting a dose of the flavor is my occasional comfort food:
Cook a mess of spaghetti and dump in the colander.
Pour olive oil or butter into the pot and heat.
Add a ridunculous amount of crushed garlic (for 1 lb noodle, 12 clove garlic is fine)and saute until barely golden.
Add a bunch of salt, black pepper, and anything else that sounds good (parmesan, garden tomatoes, herbs, chiles, etc.)
Scarf.
I don’t mean to hijack, but for my and possibly Lib’s enlightenment… this roasted garlic clove dealie intrigues me. How does one go about doing this? Just pop the peeled garlic cloves in the oven at 350 for an hour, or what?
Take a bulb.
Slice the top off of it, so you can barely see the little bald heads of all the cloves peeking through their swaddling papers.
Douse it in olive oil.
Put it in a toaster oven (or regular oven) for half an hour or so, until it feels squishy and the tops are brown.
The sugars in the garlic caramelize, it becomes very soft, the olive oil permeates it, and the result is a rich candy-like aromatic awesome treat. It needs salt, but otherwise is pretty much perfect: you just squeeze the bulb, and the paste mushes out, and you can spread it like butter on your toast, your noodles, or your lover.
I like to roast a head of garlic, mix it with softened butter and maybe some olive oil, and use that to make garlic bread. Sometimes I put some herbs on it, too, like parsley. The flavor is very mild, but it does make a statement.
Getting a clove of garlic in your food is nothing like getting a whole jalapeno, complete with seeds. If you’re really worried, though, try sticking a toothpick into each clove, which will make them much easier to identify and fish out. Then pass the cloves to someone who will cherish them for the gems they are.
So you haven’t really used actual garlic yet, then? My easy introduction to garlic was:
Cut some crusty french bread slices, drizzle with a little olive oil, toast under the broiler until golden.
Slice one (1) clove of garlic in two, rub the cut end on the toasted surface of the bread.
Top with slices of (fresh! not shredded) mozzarella. Maybe some tomato. Pop back under the broiler until the cheese is melted. Maybe top with some chiffonade of (fresh!) basil if you want to get all fancy.
Easy-peasy introduction to garlic, with no threat of chomping into a piece, but still all the garlic flavor. Once you like that, try the roasted garlic mentioned above – also easy and simple, and no chomping into pieces of garlic, since it’s all paste by then, anyway.
I get it. My ex-father-in-law was well into his 60s before he’d ever had pizza or spaghetti, and he thought they were very exotic foods. And I’m talking frozen pizza or that Kraft spaghetti boxed dinner. My own mother was amazed when she was 16 and traveled from Indiana to Philadelphia for her brother’s wedding in 1952, and had spaghetti for the first time.
If I made a quiche for my parents or my in-laws, they wouldn’t get it. It’s not the food that they’re used to, and it’s weird and unfamiliar. They’re used to bacon and eggs, maybe pancakes or even French toast, but bagels, quiche, croissants, are all strange to them. My husband is the same way, because he was raised eating certain foods, and he’s accustomed to those foods.
It’s not a value judgement, just that one is accustomed to one’s own familiar foods.
1 16-ounce loaf of Italian bread or French bread
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
2 large cloves of garlic, smashed and minced
1 heaping tablespoon of freshly chopped parsley
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (optional)
America’s Test Kitchen’s website has a better recipe (I saw it on the show) but you have to register to get it and I don’t have time right now.
It’s very comforting to know that someone gets it. About, oh, 15 years ago or so, I went to a town in Pennsylvania just north of Philly as a representative of our company. We were one of the largest customers of the people hosting us, so I was getting the VIP treatment. Early the first morning, as we waited for some people to arrive, we all gathered around a table that had some of the biggest, most interesting donuts I’d ever seen. I picked up one and admired its sheen before taking a big bite out of it.
Two seconds later, I was spewing it out into my napkin and making a horrible face. “What’s wrong?” the host asked me, mortified at my discomfort. “Those donuts are stale!” I told him.
He started laughing, and then everybody around us was laughing. I gave them all a WTF look. “Those aren’t donuts,” he said. “They’re bagels!”
Needless to say, I haven’t taken to eating bagels.
With experiences like that, I’m not surprised you’re cautious about trying new things. How nasty! (I mean: nasty sensory experience, nasty situational experience, and not particularly nice people, either.) If I was expecting a donut but got a bagel and had never had a bagel, I’d have been disgusted, too.
I guarantee your first try of real garlic you’ve cooked yourself will not be that repulsive. You know what to expect, now: a mellow version of the taste you already know and like, in a texture similar to cooked onions. You’ll have smelled what you’re cooking, too, beforehand, and not have it sprung on you.
Hey, Lib, like everyone’s saying, baked or roasted garlic really tastes nothing like either the garlic salt you’ve already tried or raw garlic. It’s sweet and mellow and great for spreading on bread or crackers. (And for the record, I like raw garlic too; I’ve been known to cut cloves of it into slices and eat 'em either like that or on crackers.
I bought a small garlic oven once, similar to this one.
That night I roasted a head (not a clove, a head) of garlic and ate it on some crackers. Hmmm…pretty yummy. So I roasted another head of garlic and ate it on some crackers. Hmmm… still yummy. So I roasted another head of garlic and ate that, too.
That’s right! Three entire heads of garlic in one night!
The next day, one of the guys at the office I was working in then returned from lunch and when he walked in the door, exclaimed: “What the hell is going on? This place smells like a damn Mediterranean restaurant!”
I guess he either didn’t notice the aroma until he came in from the fresh air ,or maybe it just took that long for my body to exude it. But at any rate, I put my brand new and much beloved garlic oven away after that and I haven’t used it since.
ETA: Lib, here’s another view of roast garlic in a a garlic oven. It’s a less daunting size photo than the other one, which might look scary up that close.
Oh, it has the same effect on me but do I care? I’m an old woman with no one to impress and my dogs fart worse than I do so to heck with 'em! Luckily for us all, though, my garlic reaction is a tale told by an idiot–full of sound and fury, signifying nothing!
Pssst… check out the link in post #32 for all kinds of good instructions! You will be glad you did so…
Oh, and this is what I call roasted garlic! I don’t piffle about with one hand at a time any more, oh no!
