I will only use powders when the moisture content of fresh would pose an issue.
This. Different ingredients for different recipes and purposes. For example, the wife hates onions. Not the flavor - the texture. So onion powder gets substituted in any recipe where the onions can’t be easily removed from her portion.
Bingo.
Try making a dry rub with fresh onion or garlic…it won’t be very dry. But there is no dehydrated onion/garlic product I would put into a marinara sauce, pot roast, chili, etc. User-submitted recipe sites feature many recipes from people with…compromised…taste buds or who prefer expedience. I prefer to put a superior product on the table. Depending on my level of distraction and amount of vegetables, it means between 5 and 30 minutes extra cooking time.
When I use onions, it’s usually as the base of a curry or something like that, so I need them diced. My cheat isn’t to use dried onion flakes but instead to use the bags of diced onions from a local market. They sell a three-pound bag of diced onion for four bucks. Sure the equivalent amount of whole onions would be a lot less, but I’m terrible at dicing them and end up with inconsistent dices.
As for garlic, if you want to cheat, you can get minced garlic in a jar. Or just keep a few garlic bulbs around. They seem to last forever.
If you try my way you’ll never look back.
Dice/mince some onion/garlic/hot pepper. Place in mortar with some salt and fresh ground pepper and use pestle to make it a paste. Apply paste to steak. Vacuum seal steak. Sous-vide to desired temperature, then sear outside. MMmmmmmm.
ETA: I do not consider myself a “purist”, I just like my food to taste as great as possible.
I always use fresh onions* but when I don’t feel like messing with fresh garlic (chef’s knife + good press) I get perfectly good results from granulated garlic. The only issue is that the granulated stuff is VERY powerful and it’s easy to use too much, or too little through excess caution. But shake it onto the onions as they’re sauteing and it’s hard to tell from fresh in most dishes.
- Framed on my kitchen wall is a quote from a friend’s novel: “Chop an onion while you wait. Much that happens in my kitchen begins with a chopped onion.”
They do not, especially in the winter around me (NYC). All of mine are sprouting, which means extra time removing the sprouts (and having to use more to make up for the lost volume). I would imagine that frozen chopped onions (and peppers) should be good as long as they are flash frozen right after chopping, in the same manner other vegetables are flash frozen shortly after harvesting. Personally, the skill of chopping vegetables is like any other skill - the more one does it, the easier, faster and better one gets at it.
Regarding rubs, I tend to make a large volume at the start of BBQ season (and whenever I run out), so I can’t have wet ingredients in there.
Ditto here. I use the powders and flakes for spice blends/rubs, and the fresh bulbs in most every other application. Sometimes I will use both in the same application (chili comes to mind, where I will have a chili powder which has the dry stuff, and fresh onions and garlic.)
Yeah, fresh garlic lasts about a week to week and a half before it starts sprouting for me. If I kept them in the crisper, though, I suspect they would last longer. Sometimes, what I do is mince several heads all up and cover them thoroughly with kosher salt, and stick that in the fridge for when I need garlic. That lasts a good long time (well over a month) and tastes way better than any of those pastes and jarred garlic you can buy (which doesn’t taste much like garlic to me at all. I’m sure it has its fans, but I haven’t found a brand that tastes “right” to me. It all tastes like stale, weak garlic.)
Garlic powder, onion powder on hamburgers before cooking. I have a tube of garlic paste and sometimes buy chopped frozen onions for when I cook soup or stew. I can’t get the smell of the real things off my hands for days, is why.
Sure, but I suggested minced jarred garlic as an alternative to dried garlic powder, which is going to taste even less right.
I use all those things. Did you know that you can also get garlic & onion juice? Even better than powder or flakes if you want the flavor to soak in to something, like a cut of meat.
Unless you are careful, though, and pay something of a premium, a lot of bulk garlic and jarred garlic comes from China. Simply don’t trust it.
I used them sometimes as a matter of convenience. If I’m boiling down a chicken carcass, I’ll use dried minced onion instead of fresh. Spousal unit isn’t a fan of garlic, so I’ll occasionally use a little garlic powder - I rarely have any other form on hand. I have onion powder, but for the life of me, I don’t know why - must have bought it for a recipe.
I try to have fresh onions on hand all the time - I like 'em and I use 'em a lot.
Fresh for most purposes, but I do a lot of sousvide cooking and fresh, raw garlic tastes strange, metallic, and turns blue when cooked in vacuum. It’s also a notorious vector for botulinum spores, which are always a concern in low oxygen environments. Garlic powder, by contrast, tastes great and can’t potentially kill you.
You don’t precook onions and garlic before adding them to the dish? I don’t add raw ones to much - flavors tend to be too sharp.
I also always reduce red wine before adding it to things like short ribs - prevents the winey taste from overpowering things.
Then again, I don’t *sous vide *so maybe this is contrary to the practice.
I use the right one for the right dish.
FWIW, I was once making a beef roast which called for putting onion powder and garlic powder on top, and found that I was out of them. I used real onion and garlic as a substitute, and it didn’t work nearly as well.
Honestly, I prefer the dried garlic powder to the minced jar stuff. Typically, though, if I don’t have fresh garlic around for something where I need it, I may just skip it or just go easy on the powder.
I use flakes and powders, unless I’m making a pot roast. Then I cut up a real onion and put it on top before I put it in the oven.
Powered Mash with powdered garlic and reconstituted meat product with generic brown sauce and American Cheese is reckoned to be one of the greatest triumphs of haute cuisine in all the top-rated Michelin restaurants.