4 Tips: How To Cook With Garlic

Garlic infuses delicious flavour into dishes and preparing it in certain ways can boost both its flavour and its health benefits. Read on to find out how to prepare and cook with garlic for maximum potency, how to cure garlic breath, and how to get rid of a garlic smell on your hands.

1. Keep it Fresh
Allicin, a healthy compound in garlic, is most potent in fresh cloves. Researchers found that crushed garlic stored in water lost about half its Allicin in six days; stored in vegetable oil it lost that much in under three hours.

2. Cut and Wait
Cutting a garlic clove breaks its cells and releases stored enzymes that react with oxygen. This helps healthy sulphide compounds, such as Allicin, to form. Allowing chopped garlic to stand for 10 to 15 minutes before cooking allows the compounds to fully develop.

3. Crush, Mince or Mash?
The more you damage garlic’s cell walls the more enzymes you release—and with them, more pungent garlic flavour. Since crushing breaks the most cells, crushed garlic cloves taste harsher, while sliced or coarsely chopped garlic cloves are milder. Intact garlic cloves are mildest of all. (Cook’s tip: mashing minced garlic with a pinch of coarse salt helps tame the harsh flavour.)

4. Get Rid of the Smell
To get rid of garlic breath, brush, floss, nibble parsley—and drink milk: its fats and water help deodorise volatile compounds. To get rid of garlic smell from your hands, rub them with a lemon wedge, salt, baking soda or even a piece of stainless steel. Rinse hands well with water.