The article celebrates garlic's importance in cooking, reflecting on personal memories associated with its use. The author emphasizes garlic's range, noting how it can be pungent raw but develops a sweet savor when cooked. The focus is on Eric Kim's recipe for garlic-braised chicken, which involves simmering 20 cloves of garlic in white wine, resulting in mellow, candylike garlic that enriches the dish. The author also shares a preference for peeling garlic manually, finding it a meditative process.
My father used to say, I'd rather have an ounce of garlic than a pound of truffles. And he wasn't kidding.
Garlic remains so ubiquitous in my own cooking that I nearly forgot to add it to my B.I.F. (Best Ingredients Forever) grand tour.
Part of what makes garlic so indispensable is its range. The pale cloves can be fiercely biting when eaten raw, but soft, sweet and earthy when cooked long and slow.
The recipe calls for 20 (yes, 20) cloves of garlic, but since they're left whole and simmered in white wine for an entire hour, they turn mellow, candylike and suffused with schmaltz.
Collection
[
|
...
]