The peel is thicker and attached firmly to the root, so cutting off the root end first will save a lot of time and effort peeling garlic.
you can avoid stripping the peel into tiny sticky pieces or digging grooves into the clove while you gouge or scrape off the peel from the top or side.
this is another lifehack I would have appreciated learning years earlier.
I usually just gently smash em with my cleaver and pluck out the clove.
that was my go to for a while, but it’s easy to wind up with sticky little strips of peel and I like making fried garlic slices, like little fried garlic chips, and you can’t use a smashed clove for those.
smashing garlic cloves will help, but since i still have to pick out pieces of peel and take off the bottom part anyway after a smash, I usually do the root end cut now.
especially if I’m using an entire bulb, it’s easier and quicker for me to cut off the entire root end all at once than a bunch of smashes.
Yo that’s fair! I’m often using garlic in stir fries or dips, so I don’t want those thin slices so smashing is fine. I’m deffo gonna try this tip for prepping some cloves for pickled garlic tho.
Other garlic related hack, you can cut the top off just above the tips of all the cloves, rub em down with a lil olive oil, wrap em in tin foil and roast em at 400°F for 35 min, skin and all. The resulting cloves can be squeezed outta the bulb like butter and make a phenomenal spread on their own or a great addition to hummus, or mix it with butter and let set for a decadent compound butter.
nice garlic game!
I’m right there with you on soft garlic.
I cut off the root end of a couple bulbs, peel and pan-steam the cloves, then mash them up in a bowl with a fork and use them like an accompanying spread or dip for steaks or scallops.
I used to sautee them but that takes forever and it’s easy to char the edges.
The garlic flavor is strong enough that intense steaming doesn’t warp the flavor and they get soft enough to whip into a puree after 10 or 15 minutes deoending on the heat.
Another good method is to get two large metal bowls face to face with the cloves inside, and shake the shit out of them like a human fire alarm.
Be warned though, this WILL terrify your cats, if you have any
I haven’t heard of this one, you shake the garlic cloves and they bump into each other and peel themselves? or does this have something to do with the specification of metal bowls?
that seems like a lot of work.
is that a lot of work?
I would imagine it’s more the collisions with a hard surface, and metal bowls are simply the lightest way to do that. It’s actually not a lot of work; it maybe takes 20 seconds of shaking. I like the other suggestion of using a cocktail shaker, though. That would be quieter AND easier, assuming it’s equally effective
I couldn’t stop thinking about the shake-peel so I just gave it a whirl.
two full bulbs pf garlic later, my first impressions of the shake-peel go like this:
I’m shocked this works at all.
lots of cloves are unpeeled after multiple shaking sessions.
deeper bowls could make a difference.
I have to clean the bowls afterward because garlic juice is coating the entire inside of the bowl.
The garlic cloves are very bruised and damaged after the shaking.
prep work of cutting off the root end and the top of the cloves makes them much more likely to be peeled by the end of the shaking.
maybe if I get better at this or I have better tools, this will save time and effort; right now it’s more difficult and disrupts my chill kitchen flow with some pretty frantic shaking, but I could see it getting easier and less disruptive as I get used to it.
definitely an interesting suggestion and something I’ll try to improve on, thanks for bringing it up.
Same trick goes for onions. Bonus points of you leave a little still attached for use as a pull tab.
Bonus points if you leave a tiny bit of the root attached to the skin so that when you pull the root off it starts the peeling process