The Zen of Mincing Garlic

Garlic's dual personality: bold & pungent or mild & sweet, depending on how you use it.

Today, I kick off my blog, Try Cooking Therapy, by talking about my all-time favorite ingredient: garlic!

When I was going through chemo WHILE recovering from a severe back injury (ahh, 23 broken bones in my back and ribs) I felt pretty useless. I couldn't stand for more than a few minutes. So to give myself some sense of being productive, I dragged my cutting board, my paring knife and chopping knife--and my sorry butt--into the adjacent family room. I sat on the couch and happily minced away while binging on some random Netflix show. (BTW, Netflix is the best streaming service while recovering from illness or injury. Easiest interface to pause...forward, and search show/movie categories.) I digress. Back to garlic...

Even though I could buy a jar of minced garlic to save time, it's utterly awful! Tastes like mushy, citric acid-infused garlic. No bite. No crunch. Not for me. There's really nothing better than freshly minced garlic. It adds so much flavor to meats, soups, sauces, and salsas. (See recipes with garlic below.) The more garlic, the better!

HERE'S MY MULTIPLIER FOR GARLIC:  Number of cloves in recipe x 2 + 1

Generally, my "garlic math" is to double the garlic a recipe calls for and add one more clove for good measure. If a recipe calls for just one clove of chopped or minced garlic, I scoff, and use 3 cloves--the larger the clove, the better and easier the task. Look for garlic heads with large cloves and no sprouts or wrinkled skin (we humans aren't the only ones who show signs of aging. :-) Beware of Elephant garlic which has huge cloves for sure, but is much milder in flavor.

Yes, garlic cloves can be tiny and tedious to chop. But if you use the flat side of a knife and use your palm to squish it into your cutting board, the skin pretty much pops right off. And for pressed garlic, I've found that the Zyliss Garlic Press is the sturdiest and most effective tool for the job.

HEALTH BENEFITS OF GARLIC

Healthy for body and mind, garlic is a power herb--offering a boatload of vitamins and minerals, like   Vitamin C, Vitamin B6, Manganese, Selenium as well as Calcium, Potassium, and Iron. Fresh garlic:

• Fights colds & wards off all types of infections--bacterial, viral & fungal
• Regulates blood sugar
• Lowers blood pressure
• Lowers cholesterol
• Detoxifies the liver

Happy chopping!