How do you cook with garlic - How To

Nov 18, 2024

Now the cloves are off.

Food content creator Lennard Yeong has been raising eyebrows (and garnering likes) on his social channels by sharing a recipe for aglio e olio (pasta with garlic and olive oil) by Michelin-starred chef Alessandro Negrini. The recipe calls for boiling your cloves of garlic five times (yep, five), with a fresh pot of water each time and straining in between, then blending the garlic with oil and water before tossing through your perfectly al dente pasta.

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Boiling five times sounds like a lot of work for a few cloves. Is there really any point to all this? Turns out there is.

Boiling garlic cloves before using them reduces their raw pungency and any bitterness, while retaining the beautifully complex, subtly sweet and savoury flavours of this classic culinary staple. Meanwhile, blanching and cooling repeatedly rather than just boiling the heck out of the things removes the volatile compounds responsible for garlic’s pungency without making the garlic too soft and goopy. Some chefs even blanch their garlic in milk, as the fat content of milk is reportedly better at removing those bitter compounds. If you also remove the ‘germ’ – that little sprout in the centre of more mature cloves – this will help to further reduce any bitterness and vampire-slaying breath problems. Some claim it also makes the allium more easily digestible.

If you’ve read all this and still just can’t be bothered, don’t fret. Unless you’re hoping to earn a Michelin star with your Friday night stir-fry, we don’t think anyone is going to complain about plain old sauteed cloves. Unless Dracula is popping by for dinner.

Can dogs eat garlic?

We’re a hound-loving crew here at delicious., so we appreciate the fact that this is pretty much the number-one question people have about garlic. And we’re here to tell you that it’s a firm no. Dogs should not be fed garlic. The sulphides found in garlic (and onions) can cause damage to dogs’ red blood cells, which can lead to anaemia. Garlic also irritates their digestive system, so it can make them sick if they eat enough of it. Even if you have boiled it five times.