Cooking With Garlic

Garlic is one of those tricky ingredients that you need to be careful with when cooking. If you don’t use enough, you won’t even know that it is there, and end up missing out on a great treat. Use too much though, and you can easily find your meal is overwhelmed with garlic. Cooking with garlic doesn’t need to be that difficult though, as long as you follow these simple guidelines.

Have you ever wondered how to correctly use garlic? After all, if you use too much then you find your meal either too spicy, or just plain ruined. However, if you use too little then you can find yourself with an extremely bland meal. If only there was some way to learn the proper way for cooking with garlic. Luckily, there is. Here are some simple guidelines that you can use to help you learn the best way of cooking with garlic.

• Watch how much you use. When using fresh garlic, the number one thing to watch out for is how much garlic you end up using. Unless you know exactly what the results of your recipe will be, you should always start with the least amount of garlic possible. If you would like a stronger taste, slowly add a little more as time goes by in the cooking process. This is especially true when using freshly cut, sliced, pressed, minced, or otherwise broken cloves of garlic.
• Heat carefully. If you are thinking of cooking some fresh garlic, then you need to be especially careful when heating it. This is because you can have some very nasty results if you accidentally burn, or scorch, fresh garlic. Whether the garlic is in whole cloves, or it has been sliced or cut in some other way, when garlic gets burnt it turns extremely bitter.
• Using cloves. If you are looking for a sweet, nutty flavor to add to the taste of your meals then you want to use whole cloves. Avoid piercing the skin of the garlic cloves, and then simply heat them up slowly as you cook them. The resulting almost nutty flavor can be an extremely pleasant addition to just about any dish, up to and including ice cream. Simply roast the garlic cloves and then slice them after roasting.
• Slicing, dicing, and pressing. Raw garlic is perhaps the single most potent form available. In fact, it could be said that a single raw garlic clove that has been pressed, minced, sliced, or diced is the equivalent in taste to over a dozen whole cloves. The reason for this is pretty simple, when the skin of the garlic becomes pierced a type of oxidation begins which is what produces such a strong odor and flavor.

In conclusion, when cooking with garlic, there is one thing above all that you need to keep in mind. That one thing is caution. Be careful when you use this herb, since it is such a powerful one and can easily have consequences that you didn’t expect.