How to Use Garlic in the Kitchen

!±8± How to Use Garlic in the Kitchen

Cooking with garlic (allium sativum) can be tricky for the inexperienced: it is a powerful flavor, but once a few basic principles are mastered it can be used with confidence to enhance and transform your food.

The greatest care has to be taken when using garlic raw. A few may enjoy munching chunks, or even whole cloves, of garlic, but for most a subtle perfume is all that is required. Wipe a cut clove around the bowl before dressing a salad. Rub it onto a slice of toast as the basic of a bruschetta. Put a few cloves of garlic into a bottle of good oil to infuse for a week or two, and then just use the oil. Use crushed raw garlic in marinades.

Garlic is often used in the base of many dishes, gently sweated or fried along with other aromatics, such as onion, celery, chilli, ginger etc, before the other ingredients are added. It takes on a wonderful nutty flavour when a golden brown; burned, it will ruin the whole dish. A stronger garlic flavour is obtained by adding it crushed or sliced nearer the end of the cooking. Garlic can be slowly roasted in its skin, either as separate cloves or as whole heads, perhaps alongside (or even inside) your joint of meat or poultry. Once cooked and soft, it becomes almost toffee-like and can be squeezed from its skin and used as a condiment, or stirred into a gravy or sauce.

A classic way with roast lamb or beef is to insert slivers into little holes you have poked into the meat with a skewer, perhaps along with a sprig of rosemary and a piece of anchovy. You can buy specially designed peelers and crushers, but a simple method to prepare and crush garlic is to lay a knife blade flat on the clove, and bash it smartly with your fist. The skin will then easily come away, and you can dice, slice or continue to crush the peeled garlic to your requirements.

Chomping on fresh parsley is said by many to cure garlic breath, but a more reliable way is simply to eat lots more garlic. The great cookery writer Elizabeth David tells the delightful story of the garlic-loving model who kept losing engagements after using the merest hint in her food. In despair, after being sent home once too often, she treated herself to a massive garlic feast and was surprised to find that next day her colleagues detected no hint of the aroma. This appears to be true: eat lots of garlic, and the body learns to deal with it. And why not? It is delicious, and very good for you.