Most delicious recipes require you to peel garlic. Oh No!
If you are a beginner in cooking, you know the pain. It takes so much time to peel those mini creatures. You are probably using the knife (or nails Uggh!) to peel off the skin of each of the garlic cloves, one by one. It takes forever to even get halfway through the entire bunch that you are working on! In most days, you probably give up or retire with a painful nail.
Now this is a drag when it comes to cooking. You get frustrated – you check the internet. And well, the internet is full of ideas. Great! But there is a problem. Not all tricks work – some kind of work, some do not work at all. It is another daunting task to check and test all the ideas floating around to know which one works best.
That is why I am here. I am here to make your life easy, so I have curated the ones I tried and tested personally. I would like to explain from the beginning, explaining all important steps. Here is my cooking hack for beginners:
Let’s assume you have got a fresh garlic and you are starting out to peel it. Let me explain from the first step.
The key idea here is that you need to to loosen the skin. This is very important to understand because All the methods aim to do just that. Let’s begin with the preparatory steps.
The Preparatory Stage:
It is important that we do not skip this preparatory stage, as our job gets just a bit easier with some preparation beforehand.
Separate The Cloves From The Bulb
First step first. Use a sharp knife to cut the bulb at the base to separate the garlic cloves from the bulb. The use of a sharp knife is the key here. If the knife is not sharp enough, you may have to put a lot of pressure to cut the bulb, as the bulb is often quite hard.
Cut The Ends Of The Cloves
Once the cloves are separated, cut both ends of the cloves. This is often a simple, yet overlooked step in easy garlic peeling. In my experience, peeling gets easier when the ends are cut.
Soak The Cloves
At this stage, you need to soak them in warm water. Yes, that’s absolutely necessary. That helps loosen up the skin before we even start doing anything. Please be careful. You do not want to cook the garlic, so make sure that the water is just lukewarm and not ‘Hot’. Okay, once we have soaked it, we can now proceed to the next steps.
Step-2 : Loosen The Skin Of The Garlic
Now, that we have finished preprocessing our garlic. It’s time for the good stuff. Know that there are various ways to loosen the skin of the garlic cloves. I will show you the most popular ways to make it work. Finally I will show you my most preferred method and I will let you know why. Ready? Let’s start.
The Kitchen Knife Trick
You can use the good old kitchen knife to press it gently. What this method does is that it loosens the skin which makes it easier to peel it. I cannot particularly vouch for this method, as you cannot crush a bunch of garlic in one go. It does ease up the process, but it doesn’t make it quick.
The Manual Method
Perhaps the oldest method, I observed many people doing this. They press one end of the garlic in the chopping board, making it crush a little bit. This in turn loosens the skin and the skin gets easy to remove.
Again, this method works, but you have to peel the cloves one by one.
Use A Mortar And Pestle
Now, comes the trick. This is by far the easiest and fastest way to peel those little creatures. We will use a tool. Yes, a tool finally. I cannot emphasize enough how I use tools to work efficiently. You can easily find this tool in your kitchen. It is a crushing tool called mortar and pestle. If you are not sure what is it, I have attached a small picture below.
Put a bunch of garlic cloves in the mortar and crush them slowly with the pestle. Make sure that the garlic cloves do not get entirely crushed, or mangled. The best part of this trick is that you can process a lot many cloves together, thus saving your time and energy.
Step -3 : Finally, Peel The Skin
Voila! You are done! Pour those garlic cloves on a clean plate. In most cases, you will see the skin coming out by itself (Yes, without you doing anything). In case some stubborn cloves decide to keep their skins intact, you may manually peel them. One thing is for sure, the skin will loosen to the point that you can peel them without much effort.
There are a few more methods that I have heard or read about. The article will be incomplete without mentioning these.
Honorable Mentions:
1. The Microwave Method
In this method, you do not even have to peel anything. Just put the cloves in the microwave for a few seconds. The skin will become lose, so you can easily peel them using any of the methods mentioned above.
You need to be very careful while using this method, as you do not want to ‘cook’ the garlic. To my experience, garlic start to get cooked in as little as 15 secs in microwave. So, use this method with some caution.
2. The Two-Bowl Method
First let me explain, what this method is all about. You have to use two bowls, one entirely covering the other. Keep the cloves in one bowl and cover this with the second one. Keep shaking it for around 20-30 secs. It is expected that the skin of the cloves would become loose.
You might wonder, why I have not mentioned this to peel the cloves. Well, I did try this method. However, it seems it is quite an exercise shaking the bowls and in most cases, I have not been able to have a desirable effect. Or is it just me?
And Before you go..
Listen, dear. You can use any trick you like that makes your work easy. However, do spare your fingernails. Fingernails are wonderful, and let’s not hurt it by peeling garlic.
Is there any other method that works for you? I would love to hear your comments.
