Cocktail shaker works good too, provided you don’t over load it. They need enough space to knock around.
Were you using hard neck or soft neck garlic? She seems to have hard neck in the video. Hard neck skins are harder, less firmly attached to the cloves and fairly easy to split along their seams. Soft neck skins are papery, flexible, firmly attached, and don’t like to come off in one piece no matter what you do. Figure this should work on hard neck, but on soft neck it should be awful.
Even the shaking between bowls works better with hard neck. Shit tastes better too.
It is much more regularly showing up in stores these days. Most of the supermarkets near me have regularly had it for close to a year. Its not harder to grow industrially, not significantly. Its harder to ship, the heads like to break open leading to scattered cloves instead of whole heads. The softneck has a less durable skin on the cloves, but there’s a lot more layers of paper meaning they hold together as heads when shipped. Until recently the varieties of hard neck raised in the US tended to be early season garlic as well, which won’t keep nearly as long.
Dunno what’s going on that hardneck is so available all the sudden.
Its more pungent, with both more general garlickyness and more of that spicy astringent allium thing (most of the time not all varieties are the same, and there are some pungent soft necks). But its got larger and much easier to peel cloves.
The stalk at the center of the bulb will be hard and hollow, and you should be able to see it or feel it projecting from the top of the bulb where the paper is closed up. Which is an easy way to identify it. Hard neck usually has a single ring of large cloves around the center stalk. As opposed to soft neck where there’s 2 rings, small cloves, and weird little tiny cloves wedged in between the layers and close to the stalk.
That’s what make’s soft neck purportedly easier to grow at commercial scale. Many more cloves per head, which means breaking up a head to plant produces a lot more plants. It not so much easier to grow as easier to propagate. Though the cloves apparently sprout easier due to the thinner shell, which is not something I noticed growing both in my garden.
You are far more likely to cut yourself by actually cutting things with your knife. Should we stop cutting things with knives?
Like, seriously. Cutting yourself with a knife while quickly slicing is really common for both home cooks and chefs. I’ve never heard of anyone cutting themselves while crushing garlic with the flat of a knife.
However, I have a bigger problem than peeling the garlic. I want to get the garlic first before I can peel it.
I am living in Jamaica in the Caribbean, and it is most difficult to get good healthy garlic. The island is flooded with garlic from China, and I am reliably informed that they are filled with chemicals.
Does anyone know how I can get healthy garlic here in Jamaica?
If you can’t figure out which side of the knife is the sharp side and you know, angle that side away from your hand, then I don’t think you should be handling knives.
