I’m just starting to get into Indian cooking, so I’m excited about a beef vindaloo recipe I recently came across. However, there’s an obvious typo in the ingredient list. The first step in preparing the sauce is to blend together some garlic and vinegar to make a paste. However, the ingredient list calls for:
1/2 c red wine vinegar
14 c garlic
Fourteen cups of garlic?? :eek: Surely not! However, I’m not sure what this should say. I figure it’s either meant to be:
1.) 14 cloves garlic
or
2.) 1/4 c garlic
Which do you think? The recipe doesn’t specify the number of servings it makes, but based on the amount of beef called for (2 pounds), I’d say it serves about 6.
I’d say either way you really wouldn’t be off too far. The Madhur Jaffrey recipe I have calls for one head of garlic for two pounds of meat. This recipe calls for 1/4 cup for two pounds of meat. It seems weird to me that a recipe would specifically call for 14 cloves, so my guess is that it meant 1/4 cup.
Figure an average clove gives 3/4 of a teaspoon of garlic pulp when either mashed with a garlic press or peeled and chopped.
14 cloves X .75 tsp = 10.5 tsp. 12 tsp. is a 1/4 cup. So the practical difference between the two reasonable interpretations is about 1.5 tsp(two cloves). Given the particular dish I think either would fall well within the range and it would depend on how thick I wanted the sauce to be.
Doing a little more research I find the Cooks Thesaurus gives a slightly different equivalence, maybe they buy smaller bulbs of garlic than I do, or I don’t cut as much away before mincing as they do.
Given that Indian grocery stores sell minced garlic in multi-pound jars and stock them in large quantities, I’m thinking 1/4 cup.
What’s said above. 14 cloves is about 1 ~ 1.5 head of garlic, which is a lot but certainly not unheard of for some dishes. The vindaloo recipes I’ve read generally use less, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find one that uses as much as this.
ETA: with the amount of meat/servings, 14 cloves is not even that much in a strong curry. I regularly make single portions with 2 ~ 3 large cloves.
Since garlic is one of those foods that is generally referred to as a whole or meted out in cloves, I am quite sure this refers to 14 cloves of garlic. And judging by some recipes I have seen with regards to Indian homecooking it would seem by convention much more logical than a volume measure.
I think you’re right. Looking online, I’m guessing it’s this recipe. Fourteen cloves is a curiously specific number, but it appears to be most likely correct. I’ve found various misprints of the recipe, and most speculated that 1/4 cup was the intended amount, but I can’t find any support for that, only the 14 cloves version.
Either way, as has been noted, the amount should be about the same.
Nothing to add to this, but we had some excellent vindaloo at the Vindalho Restaurant the other night. Spiced nice, but not too hot.
An interesting note: the word vindaloo came from the Portuguese state of Gao, hence the spelling of the restaurant, which would be pronounced vin-dalyoo. The word is a contraction of vinha de alhos, alhos being the word for garlic. I don’t think there is a literal translation of vinha de alhos: vinha can mean vineyard, or it could be a declension of the verb vir, which means ‘to come’ (or become).
