If you’ve been following the food blog, you’ll remember that a few weeks ago my daughter brought home chard. She gets so excited about bringing home her bounty that I simply have to use it.
Well this week it was garlic, complete with the muddy dirt clumps still hanging from the roots. It can’t get much more fresh than that! I use garlic all the time in my cooking. The thing is that I get it from the store. I actually tend to buy fresh garlic in a jar. I know to some the idea of jarred garlic being fresh is laughable, but compared to its weaker cousin, garlic powder, jarred minced garlic is definitely fresh. However, I’ve never used it so fresh that the dirt is still attached.
Obviously I know what to do with the dirt. On a side note the two year olds do too! One of them stuck it in the other‘s all too willing mouth! (YUK! What is it about toddlers and eating dirt?) But after rescuing my dirty little garlic bulb and washing it off, I was at a loss. So off to research I went.
The first thing you do with garlic (aside from washing it off) is either hang it upside down to dry it or process it. You can mince it or puree it and FREEZE it in oil. Do not refrigerate and do not store it at room temperature. If you dry it, which is what I did, it will look like the fresh garlic bulbs you can get in the store.
The second thing that the novice garlic cook needs to know is that the garlic bulb is a bulb NOT a clove. A clove is one of the smaller parts that make up the whole bulb. Many a novice chef have ‘garlic clove horror stories’ in which they attempted to make their dish with an entire bulb of garlic, thinking that this is what the recipe meant when it said ‘one clove’.
As a rule of thumb, the finer you chop or mince fresh garlic, the stronger flavor it will have. And roasted garlic is always an excellent edition to any book. Look later in the food blog for some fantastic recipes using that yummy garlic!
Check out the Families.com Winter ’06 Cookbook! The next one is coming out soon!
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