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We’re garlic girls. Sure, it’s probably annoying when we say to other people “when a recipe calls for two cloves of garlic, we multiply that by 10!” but it’s just who we are. Garlic really does make just about every savory recipe taste better, but sometimes we don’t use as much garlic as our heart truly calls for. That’s because peeling garlic cloves can be so time consuming, and depending on your method, it can be messy too. Garlic juices are rather sticky, and their dry papery skins tend to get stuck on your cutting board, knife, and hands when trying to peel the cloves. But of course, as always, our culinary idol Ina Garten
has an easy and elegant solution, which she demonstrated while making her penne arrabiata.
For those not in the know, penne arrabiata is pasta tossed with a spicy, garlicky tomato sauce. Garten says her recipe has “an unbelievable amount of garlic in it,” 24 cloves to be precise. So how does she peel all of those cloves and still get dinner on the table before her fabulous guests arrive?
Courtesy of Clarkson Potter.
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Here’s her simple method. Garten blanches the garlic cloves in boiling water for about 15 seconds, and then uses a paring knife
to coax the skins off. According to Garten, they slide right off, and you can see how easy it is in her video.
Courtesy of Kuhn Rikon.
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In the past, we’ve often used the crushing method, where you smash garlic cloves with your knife and then remove the peels. The peels do come off easily, but it’s a messy way to do things, with plenty of that sticky garlic juice we mentioned earlier.
We’ve also tried the two steel bowls method, and the mason jar method that Martha Stewart prefers, but if you don’t feel like shaking things until your arms feel like Jell-O, then Garten’s method seems pretty foolproof.
That is, unless you can achieve the ultimate garlic hack: just go to a Korean grocery store where they sell huge bags of peeled fresh garlic so you can add a ton of it to every recipe and don’t have to bother with peeling it at all.
Before you go, check out Garten’s best dinner recipes below:
Watch: Ina Garten’s Go-To Kitchen Cleaning Tool Is Sold Out Everywhere Except Here
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