A large clove per potato? To start? Will you marry me and cook all my meals? I won’t tell Dr.J if you don’t.
You might consider using garlic salt in place of regular salt to start with. It’s a bit milder than straight-up garlic powder, so the flavor is still sharp but a bit more subtle. I especially like it on my popcorn. When making steak fries, I use a mix of garlic salt and garlic powder in the coating mix, and they’re oh so good.
I wonder if the dogpile will continue if I share my French^WFreedom Fry seasoning.
4:2:1 Salt:Pepper:Garlic Powder It keeps in an airtight tupperware. I also have a shaker full. It sprinkles nicely over french fries. It also mixes nicely into fried potatoes and onions.
It might seem counter-intuitive, but bigger chunks of garlic are milder than minced. There’s a chemical reason having to do with surface area, but I don’t remember it.
Garlic cooks quickly, so add it late it your saute-ing. High temps tend to make it bitter, so adjust your methods.
Peeling garlic cloves can be tricky to learn. Here’s a low-tech way. Cut off the root end. Wrap a rubber jar-opener sheet around the clove, and roll it between hand and countertop for a few seconds. That will loosen up the skin. Some prefer to cover the clove with the flat of your knife and bonk it with the heel of your hand. That loosens the skin, but it cracks the clove. The way I do it? When I cut the root end off, I don’t cut all the way through. I pull up the clove while holding the knife on the nearly-severed root end. That rips a flap of skin down one side of the clove, and it gives me a start on the skinning. If I tweak the clove slightly, it loosens a stubborn skin.
This is big. I never saute garlic for more than a minute. By the time you smell garlic, it’s starting to get overcooked. You should always have a plan to stop your garlic from sauteeing before you put it in the saute pan.
I second the “Spaghetti with Oil/Butter and Garlic” concept Daniel proposed; I love it. Be careful to blanch the garlic in the oil or butter but not brown it – crisp brown garlic is a flavor unto itself, reminiscent of chewing on hard spicy cardboard.
DOdds is correct on garlic bread – I much prefer butter but enjoy it with Extra Light Olive Oil (Extra Virgin has too pungent a taste for my wife’s palate, and is a bit potent even for my own.) It’s edible made with margarine, but the EVOO or ELOO is actually better for you than the margarine, and the taste is, bluntly, lacking.
Garlic is nearly always better prepared from actual intact cloves at the time of cooking. Slivered cloves seem to be less potent than minced cloves. If you do buy pre-prepared garlic products, the jars of minced garlic in fluid (presumably garlic juice) are OK but do not buy dried minced garlic – whatever they use to dessicate it appears irreversible short of sinking it to the bottom of a pond for three years before use. You end up with near-flavorless pellets of what appear to be tiny wood chips in your dish, which has the very faintest of garlic flavor apparently leached out of them.
Something else that benefits from garlic and where you can vary the “concentration” effectively is a broth-style chicken soup, with or without noodles, vegetables, etc. I happen to enjoy Cream of Chicken with Herb Soup used in quasi-concentrated form, with just a little milk to dilute it, as a sauce over linguine (preferred), parsleyed noodles, or “soldiered” buttered toast, with a clove or two of garlic, slivered, cooked into it.
Garlic is our friend. As mentioned before, the longer you cook it, the sweeter it is. I have a garlic roaster. Wonderful invention. The garlic comes out soft as butter, just spread over french bread.
If that’s a bit much for you, I highly recommend the garlic parmesan bread spread from this site.. The chardonnay jalapeno mustard is great on pretzels. They also have raspberry garlic mustard, but it’s not listed on the site. Was just here with the SO this past weekend; Gilroy’s my home town.
Since you don’t care for tomatoes (unreal, btw, just unreal.), go with the chardonnay artichoke pesto sauce for pasta.
Heh. My mom used to saute the contents of a full jar of minced garlic until it was brown and crunchy, and use it as a salad topping. My mouth waters just thinking about it. The texture is closer to bacon bits than cardboard, if you ask me, but that might be splitting hairs :).
At any rate, brown crunchy garlic is definitely a strong flavor, and you’re right that a gentle saute will bring out plenty of good garlic flavor without releasing the uberbitter.
Here’s an easy recipe for roasted potatoes with garlic:
Melt some butter in a baking dish - about a tablespoon per potatoe, or a bit less if you’re being calorie-concious ;), Dice some potatoes (1 per serving approximately) into 1/2-inch chunks and add them to the baking dish. Peel a few cloves of garlic (1 or 2 per potato) and add them too (You can cut them in half if you want to). Season with salt and plenty of pepper, and stir so that everything is well coated with butter. Roast uncovered for 45 minutes at 350 degrees. Stir every 10-15 minutes or so.
You can vary the flavour by using spices in addition to the salt and pepper. Paprika is good - use lots. I like to use coriander sometimes, or a sprinkle of oregano.
Ooh, this stuff rocks. I make it pretty often when I’m over at my inlaws; my FIL loves them, and will quietly and with great concentration put back prodigious quantities of them.
A couple notes:
-They’re also tasty made with olive oil, which leads to my next innovation:
-If you back them at 450 or 500, then they get nice and browned on the outside, and the garlic, bizarrely, melts into this wonderful savory-caramel sauce. I wouldn’t do this if you make them with butter, because butter burns easily.
-Onions are good in them, too.
-You can also do them with Tex-mex spices: cumin, cayenne, maybe a chopped hot pepper or two.
Selinas has it - go for the 40 clove chicken and never look back. If this is the same recipe I know, you put as many whole cloves as will fit in the cavity of a chicken and roast on a low gas for 5-6 hours. The resulting taste is incredible and the garlic has caramelized and can be squished into the gravy you will be certain to be making.
Don’t eat this alone and go on a date afterwards.
I will also second the importance of not frying garlic too long - if it turns brown, throw it away and start again.
I have a bottle of extra virgin olive oil infused with black pepper, rosemary, marjoram, thyme and garlic [took bottle, added cracked black pepper, fresh herb sprigs and quartered garlic cloves, then heated the bottle in a bath of hot water for about 1 hour] and set it in the fridge for about 3 weeks, then filtered it through cheesecloth when back up to room temperature…and I keep it in the fridge as a dipping oil, or to use to make garlic bread with, or as a baste for boneless skinless chicken breasts/pork cutlets, small eye of round steaks.
At least use butter if you dont use olive oil…
Though fresh garlic bread with the olive oil, a glass of red wine, a plate of fresh raw veggies including olives and some melon wrapped in slices of prosciutto is probably about as healthy as you can get as a light lunch, midmorning or afternoon snack, or even as a light late dinner.
Wasn’t me using the margarine. Like I said, baby steps…
As to your light meal, my personal opinion is that most reds would be too bold for that mix. Go with a light, crisp white. As for infusing oils (or most of my cooking), I usually choose one herb (maybe 2, but the second is usually parsley). Just personal cooking methods…I like all the herbs listed, separate and together.
And what’s wrong with margarine? In a lot of things, I can’t taste the difference. In the things I can taste the difference, I greatly prefer the taste of margarine. If I’m cooking for just myself, the butter never leaves the fridge.
Okay. I made the post which precipitated the dog pile, and I think that’s crazy talk.
Margarine is suitable for speading on bread and toast only. Butter is far, far superiour for your cooking needs. Beyond taste, butter behave chemically different than margarine.