Garlic is so misunderstood

cauda or Aioli, a creamy sauce made with garlic and olive oil similar to mayonnaise.

By Chef Joseph Massaglia

It’s surprising to me that some people don’t like the flavor of garlic. I think it might be because they are using too much garlic when they’re cooking, or perhaps they aren’t prepping it properly.

Here in America garlic is overused in recipes. Its flavor is intense in every pizza, pasta sauce and even breadsticks (think Olive Garden breadsticks). Its strong flavor has become synonymous with Italian cooking, and in my humble opinion that is not fair. When used properly, garlic should enhance the flavor of the dish (much like anchovies do in a sauce to add umami flavor without one ever tasting the anchovies), not make the dish taste like garlic. Unless, of course, you want it to be the star of the dish as it is in pesto, Piedmontese bagna

How you prepare garlic for a recipe does affect how strong its flavor becomes. Chopping or slicing garlic is better for delivering a more mellow flavor, whereas pressing garlic in a garlic press gives a more aggressive and intense flavor. And the longer you let chopped garlic sit, the stronger its flavor becomes.

Sometimes raw garlic can be too intense in a recipe, so you can blanch it if you want to use it in salads, pesto or hummus. An easy way to do this is to microwave your cloves of garlic in a bowl for two to three minutes, or until they're warm to the touch but not cooked. The end result is garlic with a smoother taste that will go perfectly with cold dishes.

Historians have found that garlic was grown by the Egyptians as early as 2900 B.C., but none of the recipes found for those times used garlic. The pharaohs only fed it to their slaves and horses as a source of energy!

According to Burt Greene in his 1979 cookbook Kitchen Bouquets, “Upper class Egyptians shunned the flavoring entirely, as did the people of the Indus Valley (the Indian subcontinent).