Garlic unleashed.

[utopia beach]

Some years ago I realized that garlic was one of my favourite flavours. I really liked it raw in salads, especially tomato salad with basil and olive oil. It occurred to me that putting garlic into food was sometimes not very good if the garlic went in at the beginning of the cooking process. I started to insert the garlic chopped or squeezed at the end of the cooking process. It seemed to make more sense to me. Am I just insensitive to the joys of cooked garlic?

 

[Morning Glory]

I know what you mean. I recently cooked a recipe from @SatNavSaysStraightOn for Vegan Indian Potato Curry which doesn't contain garlic (or ginger) and to be honest, I really didn't miss them. When dishes are spicy, does slow cooked garlic really add very much, I wonder?

 

[GadgetGuy]

Most every meat or vegetable that I cook, I use some garlic with it! You can never have too much of it!

 

[SatNavSaysStraightOn]

I love garlic and to me at first having a dish without it was odd. I can easily lick my fingers after crushing raw garlic and I have no issues in understanding how the Roman soldiers reportedly ate raw garlic and were given a blub of it a day was it?

To me that recipe mentioned by @morning glory was odd at first. There was an original series of recipes from a cookbook called "Mango Soup" which is absolutely excellent though it takes me a long time to work out some of the ingredients because a lot of the time the Indian name is used and I have to look each and every one up (until I started writing it alongside the recipe that is). A surprising number of original authentic recipes don't feature garlic or ginger which stunned me, so I started to experiment and whilst garlic still features hugely in my cooking, there are a surprising number of dishes that I don't now add either to! Which reminds me, I need to go and plant some more garlic out. It really grows strongly here in SE Australia.