The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #165215 Message #4020373
Posted By: Steve Shaw
19-Nov-19 - 12:21 PM
Thread Name: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
Subject: RE: BS: Recipes - what are we eating?
It is far too assertive in any Italian dish I've ever cooked. All the powerful and strident raw garlicky hit is released into the dish at the beginning. Way too harsh for me. Gently squashed or finely sliced garlic releases its lovely aromatic sweetness into the food. Squashed for long cooking and sliced for a 10-minute sauté. You can also bake whole cloves, skin on, for half an hour wrapped in foil with olive oil, then squeeze out the lovely soft middles for mixing into a bruschetta topping. Or you can just throw whole unpeeled cloves into your baking tray with 1/2-inch diced unpeeled potatoes, seasoning, olive oil and rosemary sprigs for Mediterranean-style roast potatoes to go with your grilled burger. You can put two whole heads' worth of cloves in there and just suck out the middles as you eat the spuds. We fight over them. I tend to give the garlic a bit less time than the spuds so as not to burn them. Someone mentioned garlic soup. Delicious.
I do make Delia Smith's seafood sauce with minced garlic, used with caution, but I always make it the day before so that the garlic and other flavours blend. It's an assertive dish with horseradish and cayenne as well as the garlic, so the garlic sits quite well in it. Apart from that my garlic crusher never gets used. A small amount of garlic goes into my mini-blender when I'm making pesto, but I emphasise a small amount!