In defence of garlic in a jar | Hacker News Reader

In defence of garlic in a jar

thewalrus.ca

185 pointscjg400 comments

The trick of this person's story IMO isn't so much that cooking snobs are bad or that any way of cooking is good or bad. It's that the author wants to be a cooking snob themselves. They're upset that the made-up qualifications of being a cooking snob don't accommodate their disabilities. Okay yeah that's unfair, but the whole point of snobbery is to be unfair to people and consider yourself better than them. You don't have a lot of credibility if you want to be a snob yourself but are upset that you can't meet the qualifications. Instead of shaming the snob group for not accommodating you, let go of your desire to be a snob yourself. Once you do that, their opinions don't matter to you anymore and you aren't constantly searching for signs that some random stranger approves or doesn't approve of how you cook, and sometimes perceiving them even when they aren't there.

Cook however you damn well feel like. Your food tasting good to you and whoever else you're feeding is all that matters, not the opinions of internet strangers on Twitter about how you did it.

Once you really understand things and let go, you can see snobbery as kind of a joke, a fun game to play, instead of something super serious and important. I think all of the people who have strong opinions on, say, Vi vs Emacs are older and mature enough to not take it too seriously anymore, so any "flamewars" about it nowadays feel more like people joking around than an actual battle.

I don't see anything in the article that validates labelling the author a snob. They felt bad because a friend looked down on their cooking habits, so they tried to go along, and eventually gave up on it. In fact they decided that snobby attitudes about cooking aren't worth appeasing. You act as if it's your job to tell them as much when that's what the whole article was about.

All you're doing is being an anti-snob snob.

Exactly this! When I read it my first thought was: Wow in the US they even have minced garlic, isn't that amazing. I wish we had that in Germany. I hate peeling garlic, the fingers smell, why would I ever do that again if I don't need to?

Minced garlic is wonderful. I keep a big jar of it. Garlic is great. I put a lot of it in my food. A large jar of minced garlic lasts longer than garlic bulbs, it's cheaper than garlic bulbs, and it takes about two seconds to put 4 or 5 cloves of minced garlic into the frying pan. I will occasionally mince fresh garlic by hand when I'm feeling fancy, but for me the jar is way better for all of those times when the garlic isn't really the main focus of the dish, which is a lot of the time.

That said, it does taste a little different than fresh garlic. If I were trying to impress or was trying to make something garlicky stand out and taste "correct," I'd use the real stuff.

Of course depends on where you live but if you have a South Asian grocery store (or a broader Asian one that stocks south Asian ingredients) in any way accessible to you, they normally stock jars of garlic paste/minced garlic (and ginger+garlic paste).

Slightly crush it with a knife before you peel and the skin will slide right off.

I use a silicone tube. Roll the garlic in the tube and it peels the garlic.

When we started dating my wife used jarred minced garlic because it was easier.

It's ok I guess?

It has a kind of acrid quality, slightly too sharp for my tastes compared to ideal.

Having said that, I've had "fresh" garlic that is worse — usually older — so I can't say its my least favorite option. There's people I know who use dried garlic when I think jarred garlic would be much better.

The only time I think I'd be a little wary of it is with pesto or something like that. Maybe even then it would be good.

Everything has its place.

Perhaps somewhere that carries asian groceries?

Peeled garlic in a jar (or especially minced) really isn't the same as what you will get doing it by hand, whether or not this matters enough to you to not use it you'll have to try, I guess.

Right. The point of the cookbooks and the shows is to teach (and be entertaining). You don't need to teach anyone to spoon garlic out of a jar, so they're doing everything from scratch using fresh local ingredients that you might not even have access to.

This is fine; the entire tradition of cooking is about adapting to your available resources and creativity.

Some people take this way too seriously. The author and his friend in the opening anecdote appear to have fallen into that trap.

I use fresh garlic, and minced garlic, and (gasp) garlic powder. In fact, I think garlic powder is a better tool for some jobs. Fight me! (I mean, don't actually fight me, it's just garlic.)

One caveat: if anyone is curious, seriously try fresh lemons. Its such a different ingredient than the bottled stuff they should not go by the same name, and lemons keep well in the fridge.

I'm curious. what's with the lemon juice where you are?

In Australia, the supermarket brand Lemon juice has 3 ingredients:

> Reconstituted Lemon Juice (99.9%), Acidity Regulator (Ascorbic Acid), Natural Flavour, Preservative (223)

It tastes identical to freshly squeezed lemons.

Great post; this is how I felt about it too.

Go deep into any topic that excites or interests you, and you will find the worst of people's behaviors on display. Very often there will be a vocal, toxic minority whose opinions sit firmly in the realm of gatekeeping and polarization, and a silent majority will stay silent as it's simpler to avoid confrontation, or not think about the implications of such. Author's unfortunate disability made them realize this, though you can see this pretty much everywhere.

At the same time, a lot of people put too much stock (ha...) in what other people think is right and 'proper'. It's entirely possible to love cooking and use prepared ingredients, do what works for you. It's entirely possible to enjoy pineapple on a pizza, and a well done steak, with a cocktail, eat what you like and for yourself, don't eat for others.

Those people are a cancer and make up a significant portion of the population. Internet forums are breeding grounds. I've developed some strategies for dealing with them. Before I engage or do something I ask three questions:

1. Is someone telling me how to behave?

2. Am I doing this to be better than myself or better than someone else?

3. Does this change really add value to my life or labour and cost?

As for garlic, it's amazing stuff out of a jar. I use it on and in everything. I'm not disabled, I'm just lazy and fine with it. The stuff is called Very Lazy Garlic here. And fuck the snobs and elitists.

>As for garlic, it's amazing stuff out of a jar. I use it on and in everything. I'm not disabled, I'm just lazy and fine with it. The stuff is called Very Lazy Garlic here. And fuck the snobs and elitists.

First they started pushing the canned garlic, then they came for proper knife technique, and ultimately, they outlawed a good chiffonade as far too "ableist"

I think automatically saying that the strong recommendation of a preferred cooking approach is snobbery or elitist is incorrect. The same thing could be said about gentle-rewarming of a steak, vice blasting it in a microwave producing a dry husk.

Some of us are sensitive to certain flavors, and choose not to use preservatives to the extent possible. There is an adjective even used to describe things of quality "hand-made".

There's a fine line between preferring fresh garlic, and turning your nose up at garlic in a jar, and your preferences can be a lower priority. It's very situational.

If I'm making it myself? Fresh. If I'm at a restaurant and paying top dollar? Fresh. Fast food? Lol. At a friends' house being treated to meal? I'm not saying a word whatever they use.

Microwaves particularly are popular targets for snobbish malignment. They're great at doing a lot of things, but many people refuse to use them for anything for the silliest reasons (muh radiation). Of course they're not good for everything, but nothing is good for everything.

I'll have to give it a try. All of the jarred garlic I've tried tastes too much of the preservative, usually ascorbic acid. I don't have any objection to the preservative; it's just a flavor I wasn't expecting and didn't want.

Thanks for the tip.

One of the biggest problems with jarred garlic is the fact that it is often wet, and in a preservative with a flavor that imparts to the food. Because it is not fresh, it will not have the same health benefits either.

This means in order to prepare it, you need to rinse it, dry it, before it is ready to go. Doing these things will mute the flavor even more for what is an already mute flavor compared to fresh garlic.

Given these issues, I would vastly prefer using the garlic tubes more commonly found in Europe, than I would a wet can or wet jarred garlic. Garlic tubes are fresh, preserve well, and in many cases have that pungent ajoene and allicin still present that give it a zing!

To add to this, I would prefer using a dried garlic spice over a can of jarred garlic if forced into deciding between the worst of most garlic options.

#2 really nails the root of the issue. #3 is big too, you can save a lot of money and time and still get basically the same value by recognizing the diminishing returns in any domain.

I've encountered it in work-related discussions, where people would confidently label something as "professional" or "unprofessional". When in fact, it would be a completely arbitrary standard.

I've been playing dnD 5e for several years, and when I was more active, had a nearly didactic memory of the rules, or where to find the specifics of a rule.

I'm currently playing with a new group at a game shop, and have to actively hold myself back from saying too much at once. There's a certain level of "enough has been said" to give enough detail to let things continue, without making people feel like they made suboptimal character choices.

They say for atheists the worst moment is the Dark Night of the Soul, where, having accepted that nobody is keeping score, now you have to decide if anything means anything or if everything is completely pointless.

Having experienced that first hand, twice, that's definitely true. For the person it happens to. But for the people who have to deal with that person? The worst is when that person sublimates their need for belief into a bunch of 'secular religions' that they cling to like a... I don't know what word to use here, but let's say ninja is to mall ninja as crusader is to <clever word for atheist zealot>.

As for the steak, I often order medium well even though I want well done. Unless you're at a very high end steak house, which most of us aren't, they are always bloodier than you ask for and you rarely get a decent crust below medium well. At one point I had perfected the well done steak at home, but it's been so long that it would probably take me a couple hundred dollars in steaks to dial it back in.

> They say for atheists the worst moment is the Dark Night of the Soul, where, having accepted that nobody is keeping score, now you have to decide if anything means anything or if everything is completely pointless.

They're often wrong in my observation. That's the best moment of your life: it's the bright, shining point of true intellectual freedom and real free will in action (as opposed to being caged by dogma, the fantasy opinions of others, and or outright dread of a psychotic omnipotent god looking to torture you for fun).

It's the point where you get to decide what the meaning of life is for you and what matters most to you. As opposed to allowing someone else to set the board for you (parents, teachers, evangelists, preachers, assholes) and tell you what's supposed to be important to you and how you're supposed to live. It's spectacularly wonderful, and about as far away from the worst moment as you can get.

Its interesting you use "The Dark Night of the Soul" in reference to atheism cause the first place I heard it was with regard to meditative practice (and Buddhism) while its original use was in Catholicism, coming from a poem of that faith. The term has certainly got around!

From what I understand it got adapted by the existentialists as well, which is where most people would hear of it. No idea how they got it from the Catholics.

Lately there have been a lot of historians working backward looking for cases of 'history is written by the victor' situations and rewriting the histories. There's a great video out there, based on someone's PhD thesis, that places David Hume in a town in Southern France where a certain Jesuit priest had recently returned from a monastery in Siam and written a book about what he learned about eastern philosophy.

So they can't prove that Buddhism caused the Enlightenment, but we know for sure that one of those guys in those coffee shops had the opportunity to spend time in another coffee shop interviewing an academic who lived with Buddhists.

Edit: it was Siam, not eastern India, and definitely Hume

> It's entirely possible to enjoy pineapple on a pizza

I was with you up until this point. You go too far.

You can pry my jalapeno-pineapple pizza from my cold dead hands.

If it's all the same to you, I think we'll just put a hazmat bag around you and the pizza and bury you as is. I'm not touching that pizza.

My partner orders pineapple pizza then takes the pineapple off. It's there to cover the pizza in pineapple juice and that's it. She also likes teriyaki sauce to a fault so I probably shouldn't be surprised.

add a little bit of bacon and it's an amazing combination. 3 very different aromatic ingredients combining wonderfully.

(lots of other aromatic things work great too)

Pineapple for the sweet and sour taste, jalapeno for spicy, green olives for salty umami and sausage for meaty fatty.

no, really you can keep it, no one else would want that abomination.

(note jalapeno are a valid topping)

Gladly. (so I can then eat it)

Add ricotta cheese and pepperoni. Delicious.

I raise you a salad pizza. It's basically a plain margherita with a mixed green salad, cooked eggs, sliced tomato, fine ham slices and joghurt dressing added after baking. Offered by one "okay, would order again" delivery service around here, it's surprisingly viable.

On any topics, learn from the extremists but do not trust them.

also almost all chefs out there used preprepped and canned and jarred ingredients in restaurants.

no matter how high end of a restaurant, if it is at all asian related/themed food you will still see Huy Fong Foods Sriracha sauce everywhere. And it's delicious.

I actually don’t mind rude belligerent people if their opinion is novel. But I can’t stand them if their opinion is typical.

Nothing inherently wrong with gatekeeping.

Nothing inherently right with gatekeeping.

Many harmful effects, though. Alienating valuable members comes to mind.

So if it's not inherently wrong OR right, then it must be inherently neutral. Which means it can be used for both positive or negative purposes. You gave a negative purpose. I would argue that health and safety can often be seen as a form of positive gatekeeping. In context of the original post, using a knife "properly".

On a similar note, real photographers use prime lenses. Zoom lenses are for noobs who can't relocate. You also put your prime lenses on DSLRs, mirrorless cameras are clearly ulterior. If you think smartphones are a camera, you're the reason we're behind as species.

For you coffee, by the way, you grind it yourself, then you use your weiss distributor and flattener before you tamp it. If your coffee doesn't cost at least 20$ per pound and involves at least 5 manual steps, there's no way it can be good. If you put pre-ground coffee in a machine, you might as well skip these steps and drink directly from the toilet.

And since we're on HN, real developers use Unix as an IDE. With vi, obviously - emacs people can quit right now. And don't even get me started on those IntelliJ script kiddies

---

Seriously, there are always be people in each niche who think that their way is the only way and people who stray from the path are to feel the wrath of god [0]. I could go on and on with examples like this. Funnily enough, this quite often doesn't even work for them (I can tell from personal experience that bringing a DSLR with gear up a mountain is not pure fun, for example). Simply do what works for you and ignore them - unless you asked them or they pay you, their opinion is pretty irrelevant.

[0] Although it should be mentioned that usually quite a few people just act snobby for the joke and aren't actually on a crusade. The pineaple-pizza-thingy seems to be mostly a joke, for example.

Regarding prime lenses: If you are unable to take good pictures with a zoom pense you clearly have bad technique. And the only true way if taking pictures is on film, it forces to think about composition and exposure. Unless you are into wildlife and birds, there of course anything below a pro-DSLR, or maybe, maybe a pro mirroless action body and 600 mm OEM prime lenses, on a carbon fibre tripod, is clearly not enough.

On a serious note, as long as you like your pictures everything is good. If you make living selling your pics all is good as long as your clients are happy. And nobody cares about the gear used in taking a particular picture, or cooking a meal. No idea why we cannot simply enjoy common hobbies.

All that are reasons I stay away from forums and social media on my hobbies. With the sole exception of a very helpfull forum on the particular brand of my classic car, I need my technical advice from somewhere.

> Unless you are into wildlife and birds, there of course anything below a pro-DSLR, or maybe, maybe a pro mirroless action body and 600 mm OEM prime lenses, on a carbon fibre tripod, is clearly not enough.

DSLRs are far behind mirrorless these days for wildlife photography, especially birds in flight. The autofocus systems of the high-end mirrorless cameras are substantially better than any DSLR, and the frame rates (20-30 shots per second) allow far more chances to get a good shot.

Which doesn't mean DSLRs are useless. It just means you have to take more photos & spend more time to get the same number of "keepers", so depending on what you value (time editing vs time in the field vs money spent) you might want to get a wildlife-focused mirrorless for wildlife.

Something I keep in mind: The people who spend most of their time online talking about a hobby, are usually not the ones who spend most of their time doing the hobby.

Purely on the coffee note: freshly grinding coffee is by far the best $-investment vs quality-improvement you can make. A $10 (or cheaper!) blade grinder makes a noticeable improvement over pre-ground for nearly everyone, and you can absolutely just stop there and enjoy the step up and that grinder will probably last as long as your drip machine.

Very little after that will achieve such a large improvement, and no matter what it'll cost a lot more money and time (e.g. to find and buy better coffee beans).

Don't forget to grind that coffee in a hand crank burr grinder, so you can control every aspect of the process. And don't even THINK about using water that is even a degree away from 200F (I know someone who uses boiling water -- the monster!)

While you're at it, if you're drinking tea, of course follow the RFC. Pouring the hot tea out of the pot and then adding milk is absolutely barbaric.

It cracks me up how defensive people get about what tools you use, meanwhile I'm just gonna keep building things because your audience doesn't give a crap what tools were used to make the actual end product.

This is so true. And that also defines "pro" tools, those tend to be the best money making devices, and not the technically best devices. They speed up work, maybe hold longer, or are a tad more ergonomically. Because all of that matters if tools are being used for hours every day to earn a living.

In the end, it is the end product that matters. And that is influenced a lot more by the person and ingeredients / raw materials then it is by the tools being used.

>The pineaple-pizza-thingy seems to be mostly a joke, for example.

Tell me you haven't visited Italy/don't know any Italians well, without telling me you haven't been to Italy.

> Tell me you haven't visited Italy/don't know any Italians well, without telling me you haven't been to Italy.

Seriously who cares what Italians think, are you that neurotic? Hawaiian pizza is great.

I have been to Italy, a fair bit, and as far as I can tell their attitude is "pizza is a flatbread that you use to stretch out whatever other ingredients you have on hand". There are certainly regional traditions, and obviously pineapple isn't any of them, but I don't see why they'd object to you putting whatever the hell you want on your pizza.

Caveat: I haven't been south of Rome, and I gather that there may be more pizza grumpiness further south.

Something I believe is that persistent satire and sincere belief are indistinguishable in many settings, and that persistent application of satire tends to cultivate sincere belief in the same thing as the idea spreads around. Not that I think Italians look down on Hawaiian pizza as a result of satire, that's more that Italians often see a national dish that's been heavily evolved overseas in a negative light, and Hawaiian pizza is the shining example of it to be seized upon. Chicago Deep Dish being another. But online it's definitely an issue - Ironic shit-posting of dumb things eventually leads to areas chock full of people with those exact beliefs for real. That's how meme magic works. Meme something, no matter how dumb, persistently enough, and it'll enter the collective conscious as a sincerely held belief.

At this point American pizza isn't an Italian food, it's American/global. No one thinks "pizza" when you say, "lets's get some Italian".

In fact Italian pizza stores love selling pineapple pizza to tourists!

Whatever gets a euro from a tourist is whatever they will sell.

When I was in Italy, all the pizza shops sold pineapple pizza, for a slightly higher price, cause it sells that well to North Americans.

> mirrorless cameras are clearly ulterior.

I'm going to assume this is satire but in case this isn't, modern mirrorless cameras are far superior to dlrs for most applications these days. my z5 does everything my previous dslr does and gives me realtime exposure preview. And don't get me started on the Z9. With that camera, the dslr's's days are numbered.

I personally really don’t care about this judgements. But an interesting thing to me is that all the claims are pointing to a category of people. I wonder why some people what to be categorised, like, even if “real programmer use vi”, why do I want to be a “real programmer” if I don’t like vi? What’s the charm of the arbitrary tag?

If you think jarred garlic isn't good, then don't use it.

I had this conversation with my sister in-law a few months back. She prefers the fresh stuff -- and so do I.

She said she would never do use jarred garlic and suggested various tools to mince/crush fresh garlic.

I thanked her for her advice and (possibly) said "Good. More for me."

I use jarred garlic (a lot!) and buy it in quart (~900ml) containers. I don't have the physical issues the author of TFA has, I just have better things to do (and better things to spend my money on -- fresh garlic is significantly more expensive) than minced (or chopped) garlic when I'm cooking.

As for the ableist angle, I'm not convinced.

Because it's not really about not considering what others can/cannot do. Rather, it's about interacting with strangers online.

For some reason, some (many?) people think it's normal and fine to rip into people they don't know online -- something most of those folks wouldn't dream of doing IRL.

Don't like pre-minced garlic? Don't use it.

We have (or at least we used to) have a word (actually, a bunch of them) for people who berate others for doing something they don't prefer: Jerk, asshole, busybody, obnoxious fuck, etc., etc., etc.

I understand why that upsets people -- it annoys the hell out of me too. And well it should.

But as I said, I'm not buying that it's somehow "ableist," in that I'm sure that most folks don't know (or care, for that matter) that the author of TFA has a physical issue that limits what she can do.

Rather, they just take their own preferences (and in some cases, they may actually be "better" for some values of that word) and generalize their use case and preferences as "the right way. the only way."

Which is ridiculous on its face.

This isn't really about garlic. Or about ableism (which exists and can absolutely be an issue). It's about rude, obnoxious jerks who take their trained-in prejudices for the laws of nature.

Unfortunately, many folks don't feel comfortable calling others out for their asshattery and instead internalize the abuse (and that's what it is) they've been subjected to. And more's the pity.

Edit: Improved my prose.

> I use jarred garlic (a lot!) and buy it in quart (~900ml) containers.

I want to use it, because it seems like such a convenience, but every time I buy a jar it tastes...weird/bad. I think because it's always mixed with citric acid to keep from oxidizing aggressively? But then it doesn't taste like garlic anymore. Is that something you experience too? Is there a remedy? Does it vary by brand?

Fresh garlic contains alliin (two Ls, two Is) and alliinase. Cutting or crushing garlic mixes the two, which starts a chemical reaction that turns them into allicin. Allicin has an incredibly powerful flavor--it's overwhelming, even. Jarred garlic has lots of allicin and there's not really anything you can do to prevent it. To prevent the chemical reaction, you prevent the alliin and alliinase from mixing, and to do that, you keep the garlic whole. I honestly don't think that choosing a different brand or different method of preparation is going to get you any advantages here, this is just how garlic works.

This chemical reaction explains why every method of preparing garlic tastes different. If you use a sharp knife and cut garlic into thin slices, you'll get less allicin and once you cook the garlic, it will be more sweet. The sharp knife doesn't crush as much of the garlic's cell walls. If you crush garlic in a press, the chemical reaction happens at just about maximum speed, and you get a very pungent garlic flavor.

This chemical reaction evolved as a defense mechanism against animals who would eat the garlic bulb. Bulbs in the same family--onions, garlic, shallots, scallions, etc--basically engage in chemical warfare. Humans (and certain other animals) have a number of adaptations which allow use to eat these foods anyway.

Speaking of that chemical reaction, J. Kenji López-Alt says that if the garlic is cut or crushed in lemon juice (and I'd guess a citric acid solution would work by itself), the conversion to allicin doesn't happen. It's the basis of his tahini recipe[0].

No idea if jarred garlic bits are cut in citric acid or if it's added later to prevent botulism. I'd guess the latter based on how it tastes.

[0]https://www.seriouseats.com/israeli-style-tahini-sauce-recip...

Isn't that basically true of most spices? They're things we're immune to that other animals/bacteria/etc. aren't?

See if you can find Dorot Garden’s crush garlic in little frozen cubes. It retains the flavor of fresh crushed garlic. I get it a Trade Joes. https://dorotgardens.com/product-crushed-garlic/

That weird taste is probably just the taste of Chinese prison workers’ melted fingernails.

https://www.ft.com/content/1416a056-833b-11e7-94e2-c5b903247...

>I want to use it, because it seems like such a convenience, but every time I buy a jar it tastes...weird/bad.

I suggest that you do whatever you want/prefer.

As I said in a previous comment[0]:

   It's not that I find mincing fresh garlic onerous. Rather 
   the taste difference (feel free to disagree, I don't mind 
   -- please do exactly what you want to do) for me isn't big 
   enough to compensate for the convenience (and lower cost) 
   of dumping a couple spoonfuls of pre-minced (in water, not 
   oil -- although if you prefer oil, then have at it) garlic 
   and off you go.

> Is that something you experience too? Is there a remedy? Does it vary by brand?

Sort of. Yes, the flavor (if I eat it out of the jar) is a bit different, but once it's mixed into the dish I'm cooking, the difference isn't big enough for me to care.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31950407

In case you're wondering, you're likely being downvoted because the person you responded to asked, seemingly in good faith, if you had any tricks or tips for improving jarred garlic (e.g. by preparation or brand choice.)

To respond by quoting the very comment they replied to comes off as unnecessarily defensive and doesn't seem to assume good faith.

It strikes me as weird to go from a long well worded post describing how different personal opinions are legitimate, to seemingly dismissing someone for having an opinion.

Just a quick note, something my dad taught me. Break apart the garlic into segments, peel them then use a broad, flat kitchen knife and crush the garlic with the heel of your hand. Once crushed, gather together and finely chop.

I've never gotten along with garlic crushers, they leave too much of the garlic in the tool and washing them is difficult.

>Just a quick note, something my dad taught me. Break apart the garlic into segments, peel them then use a broad, flat kitchen knife and crush the garlic with the heel of your hand. Once crushed, gather together and finely chop.

Thank you for the suggestion. I am already aware of that method (as well as several others).

It's not that I find mincing fresh garlic onerous. Rather the taste difference (feel free to disagree, I don't mind -- please do exactly what you want to do) for me isn't big enough to compensate for the convenience (and lower cost) of dumping a couple spoonfuls of pre-minced (in water, not oil -- although if you prefer oil, then have at it) garlic and off you go.

> feel free to disagree, I don't mind -- please do exactly what you want to do

Meta: I think it goes without saying that readers will do whatever they want to. You telling the reader explicitly that they should do what they want can come across as passive-aggressive. Paradoxically, you _are_ telling them how they should behave by writing that.

Huh, I always crush with the knife edge _before_ peeling, then the skins come off easy as pie.

This is after washing the garlic segments I plan to use, then I save the skins along with other washed refuse from carrots, onions, celery, etc and use that when I make broths with bones I've collected.

Then from those broths you can reserve the fat layer that accumulates at the top and use that to sautee veggies, mm mm mm!

You're sounding a lot like a right proper cook. All the great tricks granny taught…

There's one company (Joseph & Joseph) which makes a garlic 'rocker' and with a soft silicone spatula you get all the garlic back, from a device which is as easy to clean as any normal utensil.

Yup, grew up with garlic crushers and have one in the kitchen but mostly do this, it's not much longer once you factor in the time to find the garlic crusher.

> they leave too much of the garlic in the tool and washing them is difficult.

if you peel the garlic first you can just scrape the rest of the bit into the dish and while it's not as finely crushed and separated as the other parts... it tends to meld in just fine(mostly) and you don't waste anything.

i find that lightly crushing the garlic before peeling helps separate the skin and makes peeling easier.

also, touching stainless steel helps remove the garlic scent from your hands.

I started using garlic crushers when I learned that you don't need to peel the cloves to use it. Plus, if you don't peel them, clean up is actually pretty easy. As for leaving garlic behind; yes, that's true, but garlic is also cheap, so you can just crush more.

This is actually the same method I was taught, and I find it simpler and faster and just generally better all around over using any "special tool" made for the purpose. Lay the flat of the blade across a hunk of garlic, smack you're done. Fast and easy.

You can also do this: turn the blade so that it is facing you and "chop" the garlic with the backside of the knife. It will crush the garlic into bits.

> But as I said, I'm not buying that it's somehow "ableist," in that I'm sure that most folks don't know (or care, for that matter) that the author of TFA has a physical issue that limits what she can do.

Well, you know, it's both.

We should be tolerant and more welcoming of other peoples' choices that don't affect us.

And sometimes we're being even worse-- being a real asshole because other people aren't able to make the choices we're sneering at them for-- because of reasons of ability, or economics, or what's possible in the place they live, etc.

When we are ready to form snap judgments of people for what appears to be their preference, we may actually be judging them for ability or economics or location or cultural background. We may be judging them for something they have little ability to control.

> Don't like pre-minced garlic? Don't use it.

There's a million things you can do to make food better. Yes, fresh ingredients are better, hand-prepared with no wait, etc.

But unless you are spending all day and oodles of money making a Michelin-class meal, you're making some tradeoffs-- tradeoffs of cost, time, effort, learned skills. And you can still make a fantastic meal that's much better than what people typically eat with pre-minced garlic and shredded commodity cheese.

But it's pretty easy for us to collectively turn judgey on small specific things.

>But it's pretty easy for us to collectively turn judgey on small specific things

That was the entire point I was trying to make. That, and that doing so is douchebaggery.

As to the ableist bit, it's not (as I explicitly stated) that ableism isn't a nasty thing -- it is -- but that those who engage in the activity discussed in TFA aren't specifically being ableist, they're just being douchebags and are insulting and nasty not because of ableism, but because they're assholes.

I guess what I'm trying to clarify is: one may think they're just making a value judgment about someone's choices, but they very easily can be actually also judging based on shortfalls in ability or income... or different backgrounds, location, culture, etc.

I agree judging based on peoples' superficial choices isn't great. But I think judging people based on things they can't change or that are close to intrinsic is even worse.

I'd go one step further: most of the people responding are probably not jerks or assholes, just people sharing their own opinions in a playfully exaggerated way which, when done in person and accompanied by grins or laughter rarely causes offense. "You like THAT movie?! That movie is the WORST! I've lost all respect for you!" They have no way of knowing that the author of the original tweet is expressing something that has real significance to them.

> "You like THAT movie?! That movie is the WORST! I've lost all respect for you!"

I don't know, this is still pretty jerky behavior when you're on the receiving end of it, even if the person speaking is "joking". Even if the entire goal is to have fun, at whose expense? Why can't I just like a bad movie and not have to catch shit for it? I think there's some truth to what you're saying, but I think there's more to it.

In 2022, it's not enough to have an opinion. You must have THE opinion. You must be passionate about it. You must attack others who do not share it. Anything less makes you a Bad Person. This is modern online discourse. I hate it.

I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but only a bit. There is something about online social interaction today that goes far beyond "the playfulness is lost to the medium". I'd argue that the playfulness in many cases no longer exists. And if it does, it's indistinguishable. Hidden among 10 other opinions that are also unnecessarily aggressive, and are not attempting to joke about it.

> Why can't I just like a bad movie and not have to catch shit for it?

I don't know anything about movies, but I know a thing about wine, food and spirits.

A thing most people don't understand is that liking a thing != the thing is actually good and vice versa. A good critic always says enjoy what you like, and their job is aiding your way to find it. Often there are objective-ish criteria to judge a thing (e.g. balance or complexity in a wine). But nobody knows what you personally enjoy. If you enjoy the taste of burned meat, a medium rare steak may not be what you like, but you can't say it's not good.

Same is probably true for movies as well. Just because a movie is bad, you can still like it. And you can dislike a good movie as well. Those two things are not the same.

>I'd go one step further: most of the people responding are probably not jerks or assholes, just people sharing their own opinions in a playfully exaggerated way which, when done in person and accompanied by grins or laughter rarely causes offense. "You like THAT movie?! That movie is the WORST! I've lost all respect for you!" They have no way of knowing that the author of the original tweet is expressing something that has real significance to them.

You may well be correct -- in fact, I'd say you certainly are for some folks.

That said, given the ubiquity of Poe's Law[0], it's an iffy proposition to engage in irony/satire/sarcasm in text-only forums.

That's a sad truth about online discourse. And it pains me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

One Christmas, my SO gave me the book _A Confederacy of Dunces_. I hated it, and only finished reading it because it was a gift (and I wanted to at least give it a fair chance). I talked to a friend of mine (a former English teacher at the University of Alabama) about the book, and it turned out it was one of his favorite books. We ended up having a great discussion about it.

I think it's important to keep in mind that others aren't you, they have their likes and dislikes and it might be a good thing to learn why they have the opinions they have.

Eh. I think what you're describing is step 1.

Step 2 is people online hearing other people talking like it has real significance to them, perceiving it as a real important norm, and then persecuting others for it.

> (and better things to spend my money on -- fresh garlic is significantly more expensive) than minced (or chopped) garlic when I'm cooking.

This sounds like one of those few weird things in the US where the processed version's somehow cheaper.

Fresh [1] garlic is around 1/2 the price of minced [2] here in Singapore.

[1] https://www.amazon.sg/Thygrace-Whole-Garlic-200g-packaging/d...

[2] https://www.amazon.sg/Jia-Wang-Chopped-Garlic-250/dp/B08NVRY...

>This sounds like one of those few weird things in the US where the processed version's somehow cheaper.

If you buy it in a supermarket, minced/chopped garlic is more expensive. Mostly (I surmise) because they charge a lot for the tiny jars and don't sell the big ones.

I buy my garlic online from folks who generally sell to restaurants/food service companies. As such, I pay much, much less than from the supermarket.

If I couldn't get the big jars at a good price, I'd use the fresh stuff more often.

I often wonder if it's also due to different communication styles. I remember in high school a friend and I would always chat about movies and tell each other what we thought after seeing one. My friend would always use language like "X movie sucked" or "Y movie was boring".

For some reason whenever he would talk about his opinion of movies, it got me a little bit annoyed, because his statements always came across as objective truth. He didn't say, "I thought X movie sucked" or "I felt that movie Y was boring... for these reasons", he just said what he thought.

My communication style was always, "I feel this..." or "I think this..." or "In my opinion, X was..." Whenever I get into arguments with people nowadays, I often notice it's because I want there to be the option for subjective opinion on things and some people don't like that. They want an objective truth that they can walk away with and say, "Well, after that conversation, we came to the conclusion that Z was awful."

Since noticing my preferences for communications, I'm more okay with people trying to say something is an objective truth. To them, sure, there's one truth but I'm not going to waste my time arguing beyond a certain point. It's not my job to convince someone else two truths may exist simultaneously.

I think it’s merely a style as you mention in your first sentence. Some people who speak using the objective style are just being loose with language. They still realize what they are saying is subjective.

I talk like this even when I'm being subjective. In fact, I largely talk like this because I used to talk and write more subjectively but I was dinged in an English class for not sounding convincing.

My partner is impatiently waiting for me to pull up the garlic I planted, which is not ready yet. First hot spell turned some leaves brown but that doesn't mean it's ready.

She does use jarred garlic for some dishes, we still go through a lot of store bought garlic, but she says it's rather bland compared to the stuff from the garden. I haven't done a side by side comparison but I don't have any reason to doubt her. Transport stable crops tend to be lacking in other characters so that probably is a lot of it. But most heirloom and landrace garlic has to survive at least 4 months and preferably 6 in storage to be viable as seed garlic, so it's not like peaches or mulberries where you have to eat, cook or can them by day 2 or they're mush.

my mom says, "don't yuck my yum"

my family applies this to much more than food. helps make me less judgmental.

>I use jarred garlic (a lot!) and buy it in quart (~900ml) containers. I don't have the physical issues the author of TFA has,

It's been so long I'm afraid to ask... But what does TFA mean?

I thought it might mean the The Fucking Article... As in "Did you read TFA? You moron." But that seems out of place for someone who wrote their edit to be "Improved my prose."

>It's been so long I'm afraid to ask... But what does TFA mean?

>I thought it might mean the The Fucking Article... As in "Did you read TFA? You moron." But that seems out of place for someone who wrote their edit to be "Improved my prose."

Just as RTFM == Read The [Fine|Fucking] Manual, the 'F' in TFA can mean either one.

I suppose that the quality of the article might impact how you think about it, but personally it's 'The Fine Article' to me. That can be ironic, but isn't necessarily.

As with most things, whatever works for you is just fine.

The Fine Article.

The fine article?

There's nothing that will cause you to mistake classism for ableism more than being upper-class and disabled. Is it ableism if you call a person lazy whose legs work perfectly well who insists on being pushed around in a wheelchair all day? Does it mean that you also look down on people who don't have the use of their legs or the strength to walk for using a wheelchair?

Even the pressure is coming from class norms. Normal people and normal cooks aren't becoming depressed because chef-influencers look down on pre-minced garlic.

Also, the packaging is a problem. The reason for all of this prepackaged stuff is because the margins are so high on it, not because grocers are fighting for the disabled. They'd love for us all to be living from meal kits.

As someone who's a decent cook but who has never actually enjoyed the fine details of cooking from scratch, I would be content to pay for that margin... but the sheer amount of packaging waste in meal kits and most prepackaged food has increasingly driven me to keep using fresh ingredients from a local grocery. Any company that can come up with some sort of happy medium there will probably get my business forever.

In the UK we can buy Italian minced garlic (Gia brand) in a tube (like tubes of tomato puree) and it's pretty good, though a bit salty. Much better than the jars of oil-preserved garlic I've tried.

However my mind was blown when I discovered frozen minced garlic, and frozen minced chillies which are now pretty widely available in supermarkets here. Once the block has melted in the pan they're basically indistinguishable from fresh.

The frozen minced green chillies are also great because, being made from a mixture of chillies, the heat is basically standardised, so there's no risk of accidentally making the dish unsatisfactory to eat because one of the chillies was unexpectedly potent, or nearly as bad, unexpectedly weak.

I shop a lot at the Indian supermarkets in the UK and frozen blocks of ginger, garlic etc are totally normal. If anyone called my parents or relatives idiots or say they were unable to cook, when Indians basically make nearly everything from scratch, I would have told them to f-off and take their snobbery with them.

If you regularly do Indian cooking it's a good idea to make your own ginger and garlic paste and freeze it in ice cube trays. It takes maybe 10 minutes to make a batch that will last a month. It's well worth it and costs probably a fraction what those pre-made ones cost.

I'd struggle to beat the supermarket frozen garlic blocks on price.

My local supermarket sells the 400g bags of frozen minced garlic at £0.95. The same supermarket sells 4 fresh garlic bulbs weighing approx. 280g for £0.99.

The same holds true for essentially every frozen vegetable. I believe the reason is that there’s less work and less wastage in the frozen product. It’s taken straight from the field to the factory without much chance to spoil, and the frozen product it simple to handle and doesn’t spoil easily any more.

Fundamentally, I’d also believe that in most cases, buying the frozen product instead of buying fresh and then freeze will give you a superior product since it’s much fresher when it is processed.

I'll do you one better, just throw ginger root straight into the freezer and grate what you need. You don't even need to peel it.

better still, any fresh ginger that doesn't get otherwise used get turned into ginger bug (a yeast starter culture) for home brewing ginger-beer. again no peeling as most the microbes you want are on the skin anyway.

I've completely converted over to frozen minced garlic. I especially like that it comes in a blister pack you can push out without having to get garlic all over your hands.

I also buy cilantro frozen as well now too since dried cilantro is basically useless and I waste too much when I buy fresh.

Frozen food is very likely to be fresher than "fresh produce." Unless you're driving down to the farm and buying it on the day.

Dip into more frozen food. It's cheap and extremely tasty.

Frozen minced garlic, onions, peppers and roasted vegetables are staples for all kinds of weekday stews.

personally i buy large amounts of onions and carmalize and then can them for latter use. Its major time saver and gives a quick savory flavor boost to any dish without having to cut and brown the onions which takes a long time if your are in a hurry which with three children and working full time

But those serve 2 different purposes. The diced garlic in preserved oil is good for cooking in a pan, but the tube of garlic is handy when you want to mix it with butter to make a dip or sauce.

I wouldn't use the tube while cooking.

If I need diced garlic then sure, though I'd probably just chop garlic cloves for that. For me the inconvenience of garlic comes from getting it to minced texture to maximise the flavour - peeling it's not that big an issue once you've learned the 'gently crush it with the side of the knife' technique.

But I can't really think of a dish I cook regularly where I must have diced garlic as opposed to minced. Even making aglio e olio I'm perfectly happy with frying minced garlic. You get much more garlic flavour for the same amount of garlic that way, and because you cook it lower and slower (larger surface area) there's less chance of burning the outside and making everything bitter.

Living in Singapore I discovered the diced garlic, it opened a whole new world. I love LOVE garlic but I hate the smell on my fingers that lingers after dicing up alot of garlic. So being able to throw like a few table spoons in the pan for cooking stir fry or such instead of dicing up 10 cloves is handy. And I don't need extra oil.

But the tube stuff, if you soften butter, mix butter, tube garlic, and any spices you like, then put that on bread or use it as a dip, omg. :-0~~~~ sooo good.

Both have their usages.

Soup I just throw the cloves in the soup without peeling. Or use black garlic. Chicken soup made with black garlic is the beez kneez.

You're being downvoted, but I had the same thought. The garlic paste is going to be stronger in flavor than the diced garlic. If you use it, you'd need to adjust the recipe. This has nothing to do with gatekeeping: diced in oil or squeezed out of a tube are both fine, they're just not 1:1 equivalent.

This is quite funny. We have a group of friends really obsessed with making great food. We cook together menus with top notch ingredients retrieved from local sources, spending days studying recipes and planning menus and practicing each step. I love to make great foods for any friends who visit, if I can make time into my calendar. At the same time, we also share all possible hacks for making fast and efficient foods, sharing information which ready made canned things taste good and which not. Never discarding something because it's not "pure". Some processed goods and premade meals are amazing! Everything has their time and place. Being food snob 24/7 must be super exhausting. It has its time and place, sure, but most of the time I want something tasty with minimal effort.

For this sort of thing. 'Cheat' where you dont care and and prep where you do. I have one recipe that is pretty much only canned items. I have tried doing scratch on it. That thing will just not come out the right way. But the 'right way' is it tastes the same as my mom made it. She used canned. Canned/pre-prepped has usually one thing going for it. constancy. The taste/shape/feel will be pretty much spot on every time. When going self prep though your ingredients can make a wild difference on how things come out. I have one I make from scratch and just depending on the day the cut of meat will be 'off' somehow. Looks identical to all the prev times. But still comes out different. The major downside to canned/pre-prepped is usually salt. Many are heavy in salt (which I personally like) but I know many dont. One thing I always cheat on is tomato sauces. I rarely can make it better than something out of a jar from the store.

Another problem is what counts as cheating. Often, “cheating” techniques are actually delicious or even superior but because they are coded as low class they get rejected.

I will never not default to using canned beans in recipes. My weekly meal prep involves mostly fresh ingredients, save for the canned beans and microwaved rice.

The whole process takes about an hour already, and I just have no desire to cook the beans or rice in my tiny kitchen. And, the packages they come in are perfect size for what I need.

Yeah I don't disagree with the article, but at the same time I can't shake that vibe that the author is also guilty of precisely the same crime they're finger-wagging about: shaming other people for their passions and preferences.

It was a nice article, but also left a slightly sour aftertaste; surely you can just say "actually prepeeled garlic has its own set of benefits which you may not have thought of, here is a nice article pointing some out" and leave it at that, without going for the "you ableist scum" narrative to get the point across.

I like peeling garlic when I cook. The implication that I henceforth have to consider myself posh privileged ableist scum whenever I peel garlic is not something I particularly cared for to be honest.

I've recovered from serious injuries before, mostly broken bones, but there's been some nerve stuff in there as well. I think the article is more to say something is better than nothing. To me it seems like a person finding a way to live like themselves and embracing the fact that they are becoming their own source of influence.

Anyway, sometimes I'm so tired from the programming mines that heating up a frozen meal or even driving to pickup take out feels like I've done something.

Yeah, I know the feeling. :brohug:

I find the secret is small victories. Or, probably part of the secret anyway. :)

Most, or all, cooking pop-culture is coming from a standpoint that puts the taste of food before any other concern. And yes, in general fresh produce processed right before cooking is unbeatable in taste (ignoring the large world of home-made preserves). I don't think its ableist to focus on this in your cooking show, and sing the praises of the tastiest possible food.

Of course, in practice, for people who aren't working as cooks at least, there are many concerns more important than getting the last possible bit of taste from your food (that you may not even taste until you've developed your palate a bit). Convenience and prep-time are extremely important as well, and will often dominate your ability and willingness to cook half-way decent food far above the freshness of the ingredients.

The biggest problem is when such normal compromises start being associated with pride and shame. For example, I greatly enjoy high-quality coffee (especially Panama Gesha varieties), and I know how important is to freshly grind it to get the perfect taste. But most days, I just need a quick cup of coffee before work, so I make a cup of pre-ground cheap coffee. I don't think it's "just as good", but I'm also not in any way ashamed of using such inferior coffee.

A wise old co-worker once told me: "The secret to happiness in life is bad taste." He logic being that if you only expect the best, you will be disappointed most of the time and to learn to like the mediocre (or lower). Rather stoic in nature but applies to "snobs" as most people associate food/wine/coffee/booze snobs as always complaining about things not being correct.

The problem I have with this blog post is that the author is conflating two things.

The author has a disability, and the author's disability means they struggle with fine tasks. Obviously absolutely nothing wrong with that part.

The author then launches into a lengthly tirade about "food snobs", some of which is not really supported by facts. Not cool.

Because the problem is that its hard fact that pre-ground spice looses its potency very quickly compared to its whole counterparts. And its a hard fact that you have to "do stuff" to garlic in order to put it in a jar or a tube in order to preserve it (you will have to suspend it in something, many processes will likely add salt to it, I suspect quite a few will add preservatives to it, others may even heat it in order to sterilise for long shelf life).

e.g. quick internet search, example product "Gia Garlic Puree 90G", its ingredients ? Garlic (55% - Origin Italy/Spain), Sunflower Oil, Salt, Preservative (Potassium Metabisulphite)

So, 55% of what is in the tube is garlic. The rest of it ? Salt, oil and preservatives.

Calling people "food snobs" for pointing out hard facts is not cool. The fact that garlic in bulb form is different to tin/tube garlic is simply an inescapable fact. Different texture, different strength, different everything. It is quite clearly not "just pre-chopped garlic".

In the end, IMHO the author should have focused more on the quality of life aspect and less on the ranting.

I have a lot of respect for the author in finding ways to adapt in order to maintain their quality of life and their love for cooking. I think that would have made for a far more interesting blog post than an unsubstantiated rant about "food snobs".

P.S. I'm not saying "food snobs" don't exist, they certainly do. But the author picked the wrong example here !

Yes, this is nothing but a wasted opportunity. Instead of showing a story of overcoming challenges, it tries to make the case that everyone should stop pursuing excellence just because it is unattainable to some unfortunate minority facing some kind of handicap.

It is basically saying "because I care about this and I can not be as good as others, everyone else should be brought down to my level." It glorifies complacency and appeasement to the lowest-common denominator.

You see this type of mentality applied to everything. Every moral failing should be normalized "because no one is perfect". Any one that tries to defy the odds is privileged and selfish.

It seems like no more articles can be written today to inspire people. It's like every media channel wants to you believe "See, things look shit now, but you should be content that you are not as bad as this poor soul."

The author didn't pick the wrong example here. Pre-minced garlic is good enough for most people. The oil is a neutral flavor, and the small amount of salt isn't going to affect the taste at the end. --Once it's been cooked, the difference is indistinguishable to all but a few super tasters.

Most home cooks don't want to grind all their spices fresh, and even most professionals probably don't, for example try to grind their own cinnamon. The pre-ground stuff is good enough, especially if you pay attention to use-by dates (which are still going to be pretty conservative).

It absolutely is food snobbery to suggest that if you use pre-minced garlic or pre-ground spices that you aren't a real cook, or that you should just leave the ingredients out if you can't use fresh versions for whatever reason (health, time, or even just laziness).

> Once it's been cooked, the difference is indistinguishable to all but a few super tasters.

I don't think that's correct. My own experience is that pre-minced garlic tastes very different from garlic that you mince yourself.

It takes a long time to get a sense of how different versions of ingredients differ, and what the impact is of using prepared foods. Dried basil is radically different from fresh basil, and both options are good. Frozen peas are as good as fresh peas in nearly every dish. Fresh pasta is usually no better than dried pasta. Frozen concentrated orange juice tastes radically different from fresh orange juice, but both options are good.

Pre-minced garlic in a jar is just too different. I don't think I'm any kind of "super taster". Garlic is one of those foods can give you radically different flavors with different preparations. It's because as soon as you cut or crush the garlic, it starts a reaction between two chemicals called alliin and allinase, producing allicin. The allicin can then participate in further chemical reactions. In the jar, the chemical reactions have a long time to progress.

Elitism is cooking is why I rarely engage with people about it. I violate a lot of culinary "rules" because I just don't like it that way. It is kind of deflating to be publicly ridiculed as being ignorant or naive because you use iodize salt, you boil rice like people make spaghetti, you think cast iron sucks, you like drip brew coffee best, or you use flour slurries to thicken soups (I guess some people assume this only works with corn starch). Fuck'm

I use the garlic paste that I find in the Indian sections of the grocery. It's not the best for dishes with raw garlic, like aioli because it's too spicy, but in cooked dishes, it tastes like garlic.

The garlic paste in tubes?

Works great.

I have a stack of those from Aldi, they make other kinds too, Ginger and a few others.

Do I buy and use fresh garlic too? Yes, sometimes, but, if I just want some minced garlic for some dish, it's perfectly fine.

I was thinking the Indian stuff in the big jars. Deep is the brand I usually get. https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Paste-Garlic-10oz

The stuff in the refrigerated tubes is good too. They just run out a lot faster.

I hate garlic and remove it from every recipe, you should see how much hatred that has garnered me over the years.

Now this is the perfect scenario for bringing a packet or two of garlic salt to the dinner party! Everybody's happy!

> think cast iron sucks

If you’re elitist at cooking, you love cast iron. If you’re really elitist about cooking, you realize that it actually does suck.

(There are cookware-safe materials that will beat it on any aspect of heat transfer you’re interested in).

Are the alternatives as forgiving about cleaning it when you do manage to get something stuck to the surface? I've never found a nonstick surface that can't get a sauce burned onto it. The great thing about cast iron is that if you do have a tough cleaning job you don't have to worry about damaging the surface. At worst you may need to re-season it, but that would be very extreme.

Some nonstick surfaces come with instructions telling you not to use metal turners or tongs, that kind of nonsense is just not worth it.

My religion is Christian. I'm not allowed to make a god out of cookware, text editors, cars brands, or any of that others.

Cast iron is cheap and works, so I use it. Maybe whatever else is better, but I'm busy making supper not building storage for another cupboard to store whatever the perfect pot of the day is.

I just got into watching recipes from Marco Pierre White and he uses basic bouillon cubes for most of his seasoning.

I think what the author meant to say is to ignore your critics. No one ruined the author's love of cooking other than the author taking their statements to heart.

Also while some of the comments are needlessly harsh, they are at some level true. Fresh stuff usually does taste better and cost less.

If you told someone “I’m using this because I’m disabled so it’s easier”, no one is going to second guess that. But for the average person, they are better off doing things the suggested way.

I used to use things like pre grated cheeses until someone told me they are vastly inferrer to grating it yourself so I switched and my cooking improved.

Sure, some people make a song and dance about it and call ingredients dried cat vomit but they are correct that fresh is much better if you can manage it. And even the hardcore home cooks will look the other way on things like frozen puff pastry.

True. Also, you can always criticize your friends right back.

This is honestly just a sad case study in people putting way too much value in other peoples opinions. In this case literal complete strangers. And it’s a uniquely modern phenomenon because even 15-20 years ago it would have been nearly impossible to find these people who take pride in gate keeping. The modern world has given these people a massive megaphone and outsized influence.

Their opinions are bad, they should feel bad, and you should ignore them with prejudice. Live your own life and be happy. You don’t need to min/max everything because some loudmouth purist on the internet insists it.

I’ve seen Gordon Ramsay cook with tomatoes from a can. Go ahead and use whatever you find simplest or most cost effective and truly who gives a shit what internet experts think.

> even 15-20 years ago it would have been nearly impossible to find these people who take pride in gate keeping.

This is wildly inaccurate. Especially in cooking, notions of what constitutes proper cooking, especially when evaluating women's worth as house keepers, have been extremely common in the vast majority of traditional societies, along with the toxicity.

Snobs have always existed. What I said it was hard to find those snobs because you had to actually meet them in real life. There was no Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit to tell people what they're doing wrong. You had to go find a book, join a club, read a newspaper, or something similar. It was exponentially more difficult to find a snob.

One pernicious side-effect of gatekeeping snobbery is that it pushes beginners to adopt techniques and tools that don't make sense that early in the game.

To give a concrete example: personally I'm an interested pool beginner (~c- player). One day, while at the local pool hall I saw a couple of guys that I could immediately tell were less experienced than me. They both had ~1k euros Predator cues, jump cues, break cues, the whole thing. They went on about deflection and Masse shots (pretty advanced stuff) and then proceeded to fail most of the pocket shots they played. They would have been way better served by the cheap pool hall cues and just focusing on the right posture when they leaned on the table...

My impression is that you only get this nonsense when people are being competitive about cooking rather than actually caring about eating nice food.

There are shortcuts that work and shortcuts that don't work so well and IMO it's an incredible waste of time to put effort into something that doesn't make a difference.

FWIW my best tricks (which I learned from other people):

1 - to make pancakes (English style i.e. thin) use self raising flour anyhow because it cooks through better. 1 egg per 100g flour and at least 125% liquid to flour ratio. If you want to be fancy you can grind up oats and substitute them for about 40% of the flour and there's a minor improvement in taste and I feel it's very slightly healthier perhaps.

2 - Worcestershire sauce makes mince dishes better - e.g bolognaise or the filling for Shepherds pie. With it, you can stick to very basic ingredients and still get a good result (e.g. fried onions and ketchup/tomato paste).

Worcestershire sauce is my secret weapon in burgers, chili, and other meals with ground red meat! such great umami flavor!

For things that the spicy undertones wouldn't work well with, consider trying fish sauce. It's even more intense with the umami boosting ability. It's practically liquid MSG. I recommend Red Boat 40°N to people unfamiliar with it as an ingredient, it's basically "first press" and has a clean and pure flavour.

Cheaper fish sauces can be very fishy. Good fish sauce won't make the final dish taste fishy unless you use an extreme amount.

Do you have a good fish sauce brand? I tried one once and even a couple of drops in a sauce I was preparing managed to make the entire house smell like Poseidon's week old gym socks.

I feel like snobs really miss out on enjoying the full spectrum of the thing that they’re snobby about. I know people who only drink single origin coffee and single malt whisky and the like, but to me often a good quality blended product of either usually tastes just as good, and far cheaper.

For me, being free to enjoy something for what it is, rather than what is not, makes life much more enjoyable.

> For me, being free to enjoy something for what it is, rather than what is not, makes life much more enjoyable.

This is honestly the mature endpoint of any snob or obsessive's journey - relearning how to enjoy the bad and the ordinary. But I'd argue the chasing-the-dragon phase comes with the territory of diving really really deep into anything.

By learning the deep intricacies of some area (be it food, coffee, music, musical instruments, headphones, chefs knives, fountain pens etc etc) you learn to appreciate the highs of the best, most nuanced things that area has to offer. But you also learn how to pick apart all the flaws and imperfections in things you otherwise may have enjoyed.

It takes a long time but I'd say the journey of expertise goes from enjoying the bad or ordinary for what it is, to disliking it for what is, to enjoying it because despite all its flaws, what it is is still pretty good.

"Qingyuan declared that there were three stages in his understanding of the dharma: the first stage, seeing mountain as mountain and water as water; the second stage, seeing mountain not as mountain and water not as water; and the third stage, seeing mountain still as mountain and water still as water." - https://terebess.hu/zen/qingyuan.html

Beer is pretty funny that way. The most fancy, expensive and artisanal beard guy stuff is often impossible to distinguish in a blind test, it's just sharp tasting hop juice.

Atleast with beer you can actually get different tastes.

The tests with water are funny, when knowing the name or price people pick the most expensive one as the best tasting, when it turns out that all the bottles were filled with tap water.

It's spectacle and consumption.

It's not about the actual thing, it's how consuming it makes you feel. So if drinking one beer makes you feel cool and part of a group and another beer that tastes the same doesn't, then many people will think the first beer is authentic and more real.

In a way the author of the article is actually wanting this phantom sense of belonging and authenticity. They are looking for that feeling of buying and consuming stuff.

I use normal bulbs of garlic as it was as I learned to cook (my country grows and uses garlic a lot) but I had no problems using 'pre prepared' garlic when I lived in other countries, BUT I would recommend everyone that does so to make sure it is sourced ethically (seems most peeled garlic in America comes from china, which doesn't have a good track record: https://www.ft.com/content/1416a056-833b-11e7-94e2-c5b903247... )

China has entire regions now, where they have to pollinate fruit trees by hand, due to excessive pesticide use. Saw it in a movie about declining bee populations.

So there are additional reasons to not eat garlic from China.

Regardless, source local is a good thing anyhow.

Not to go too far with commercial promotion, but I'm pretty sure that in the US garlic distribution, especially the processed options, are dominated by Christopher Ranch in Northern California: https://christopherranch.com/products/

> seems most peeled garlic in America comes from china

I used to eat at a restaurant in Shanghai which had a fridge in the back, in which enormous bags of pre-peeled garlic cloves were visible.

I was going to post this as well.

The culinary arts are second only to the world of audiophiles in being seriously in need of some double-blind tests to dispell long-standing myths.

The trouble is some myths are true. I have a strong hunch about a few that aren't but I'd love to see a TV show that tested some pundits to actually tell the difference.

Serious Eats does a lot of double blind testing and analysis of long standing culinary myths.

They're mostly Cook's Illustrated personnel who have been doing similar testing for many decades. Similarly, many of the Serious Eats alumni have moved on to do their own thing. (J. Kenji López-Alt for example).

But their focus is very much on taste, sacrificing convenience to maximize taste. Only when the double blind shows taste to be equivalent do their recipes contain the more convenient step. If you read the entire article prose it'll give you some hints on which conveniences will have little effect on taste and which will significantly compromise the dish.

I think in cooking, there is a joy that comes from the raw, fresh ingredients themselves. If you ever watch videos of Gordon Ramsay buying ingredients at Borough Market you see the passion he feels for fresh produce or a perfect piece of fish.

I very much share in that. I've tried to learn how to cook light and fragrant Vietnamese and Thai dishes lately. Coming home with grocery bags full of fresh lemon grass, thai basil and vegetables is just really satisfying in its own right and motivates to cook.

I would just like to add: frozen peas and spinach are amazing. Doesn’t spoil, can easily be added to pots or pans and often tastes better than the fresh alternative for a fraction of the price.

Put them in a small bowl and microwave for a minute or two, add butter or olive oil and salt and pepper and you have a delicious, cheap and healthy hot side dish to any meal.

I’ve also experimented with buying frozen soup vegetables as an easy shortcut when making broth. Carrots and onions usually come out with a poor texture after being frozen but they are discarded when cooking stock.

Frozen veg is usually healthier and fresher than "fresh". The only reason to avoid it is because the texture changes. If you're making a casserole or anything where "crunch" doesn't matter then there's no reason not to use frozen.

frozen spinach is not even remotely similar to fresh spinach

> Shredded cheese when you could grate your own

I find pre-grated cheese so bizarre. The cost alone compared to a normal block of cheese should be enough to put anyone off. It's not even like it's an arduous task to grate it yourself (Or is it... [1]).

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWS3IxfDOHE

>The cost alone compared to a normal block of cheese should be enough to put anyone off

Hm, I find grated cheese is often cheaper pound by pound than blocks of cheese. Same for other precut ingredients like bacon for instance. The reason being that it's an easy way for producers to process the ends which can't be sold otherwise.

weird, I have the exact opposite for where I shop for cheese. The blocks are usually cheaper (usually like half as much). Though they like to play games with the prices. Where 16oz will be one price one week and 2 8oz will be more than the 16. Then 2 weeks later the opposite will be true. The downside is grating it takes time. But if you do go with block get a firmer cheese. Some of the brand names will not be very firm and slime out the grater. I usually have pretty good luck with the 'store brand'.

In the UK it's a lot cheaper for the blocks:

  - Tesco Extra Mature Grated Cheddar 250g
    - £ 2.25
    - £9.00/kg
  - Tesco Extra Mature Cheddar Cheese 220g
    - £ 1.90
    - £8.64/kg
  - Tesco Extra Mature Cheddar Cheese 400g
    - £ 2.85
    - £7.13/kg
  - Tesco Extra Mature Cheddar Cheese 700g
    - £ 3.50
    - £5.00/kg

edit: Added price for a 220g block of cheese

I switched to block cheese when I found out that pre-grated cheese (SO convenient) has anti-caking agents which alter the flavor. The only thing I did to make this easy? buy a 2nd grater so I could still grate cheese if the first was in the dishwasher. I'm sure it's already paid for itself.

On a 5lb block of cheddar, I use a plastic sandwich bag over the exposed end of the block with a rubber band wrapped around to keep it fresh.

The anti-caking ingredient has a negligible effect on flavor. Where you want to avoid them is when you're cooking a dish where you want the cheese to melt smoothly. Using the pre-grated stuff is fine for things like tacos, burritos, pizza, and even omelets. For stuff like mac and cheese and other cheese-based sauces, that's where you want to grate your own if you can. --And if you can't, well, the food will probably taste just fine even if it doesn't look quite as good.

It also sometimes has extra ingredients to stop the strips sticking to each other and in the majority of cases uses lower quality cheese.

And those ingredients add to the allergen potential. And even with them, it still has a fraction of the shelf life of cheese in block form due to surface area:volume ratio.

I prefer "mexican blend" (cheddar, monterey jack, asadero, queso quesadilla) cheddar for garnishing Mexican-type foods. Pure cheddar is great stuff, but I'd prefer store-brand Mexican blend over grated Tillamook Sharp if I'm making a quesadilla. Keeping and grating those individually would suck.

I get the finely shredded Mexican blends for hard-shell tacos.

It's impractical to get the thin, fine lines of shred off a block of cheese, and even if I do, without the cellulose it will just clump again when I try to stuff as much other stuff as possible on top of it. It's a better product for the dish.

The bigger blocks of cheese are cheaper.

I've noticed not much difference in price in the small blocks (The blocks that fit in your hand. I'm to lazy to look up the weight.) are sometimes more expensive than grated, or sliced.

I'm pretty sure the companies know most of us do not want 5 lbs of cheese in our fridge, so they jack up the smaller blocks?

While I'm here, I try to buy my spices, including dehydrated onion, at Costco quantities. Most restaurants use the same, but get better pricing through Sysco type companies.

Some Costco's sell yeast blocks which last a long time refrigerated.

If you are lucky, you can find high gluten bread flour there too. It's much cheaper than the better bread flours (King Arthur, etc.) at the supermarket.

The one thing I disagree with is bottled lime/lemon juice. After it's opened once, it tastes nothing close to a fresh lemon/lime.

It's mixed in with the preservative tastes of vinegar and benzoates. From a culinary perspective, hard pass based on that alone, unless that's a desirable trade-off for whatever your use cases are. The difference is simply extremely palpable.

You're not really tasting what's mixed in; it's actually the garlic that is different. Cutting or crushing garlic starts a chemical reaction between two chemicals in the garlic called alliiin and allinase, which produces allicin. Allicin is the characteristic flavor of garlic that's somewhere between fragrant and overpowering. Using pre-cut garlic means that these chemical reactions, and other reactions, have had a lot of time to progress.

Sure, there's a chemical reaction at play, but I think it's a strong assumption that they can't taste the vinegar. Sure the garlic now tastes different, but vinegar is also a strong taste that plenty of people, including me, will notice.

I'm quite sensitive to vinegar, and really don't like having it in my minced garlic unless it fits the sourness of the dish. Most of the times I use an oil based one as the flavour is more neutral.

I can't even enjoy poached eggs in most places, since most taste like vinegar to me. I discovered later that it's a common trick to add vinegar to more easily poach eggs, but for me it normally overpowers the flavour of the egg.

That's really interesting, I believe it. There's a ton of stuff which gets its taste affected by even just a few hours in the air and oxidization. Apples come to mind.

And in many cases it can make a huge difference even outside of taste.

For example, using pre-shredded cheese on your pizza? It will never melt and become gooey the way a low moisture block of mozzarella you've shredded yourself will.

Because, as it becomes obvious once you learn about it, in order to prevent that shredded mozzarella from becoming just a clump of cheese, which is exactly what would happen considering the temperature differences it goes through and all sorts of crushing pressures that are applied on it until it makes it to your fridge.

The pre-minced garlic needs all sorts of preservatives that will impart a significant flavor to preserve it and prevent it from browning.

Presliced fruit is almost always gonna be covered in something to prevent it from spoiling. Sugar syrup might be the least offensive, but then it becomes less of a fruit serving than a sugar serving.

There are good convenience foods you can use.

Frozen foods are usually pretty high quality. The texture might not work for certain applications, but they are usually flash frozen when they are at the peak of the season and so really good when they're used. In fact, stuff like canned tomatoes are often better than their "fresh" counterparts during the off-season.

Canned foods can also be excellent.

No one sneers at people for using those, and in fact, most good chefs (and most of hte TV chefs as well) will recommend using those. Heck, even frozen sliced and peeled vegetables.

But some convenience foods are simply not good if you are capable of doing without. Processed garlic is usually one of those.

Yeah, it's 100% better to use fresh ingredients where possible and just do the processing right in the kitchen. I just kind of figure the person who wrote this article could really benefit from a couple of different easy to use food processors if their hand is messed up.

There's a ton of great information on the internet that I'm going to keep in mind in case I ever get gravely injured: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cooking+with+on...

The title should be reworded "How my reaction to criticism online almost ruined my love of cooking".

We have no control over the outside world, but we do have control over our reaction to it.

I've always thought that the reason to avoid garlic-in-a-jar-of-oil was because of botulism:

https://ask.usda.gov/s/article/Can-you-get-botulism-from-gar...

The major concern is with homemade garlic-in-oil. Garlic tends to have botulism bacteria, but they can't thrive in an aerobic environment. When you put it in oil, it will thrive (even when refrigerated) and produce the toxin, which is deadly.

The only way to kill the bacteria is to cook it at an extremely high temperature/pressure, which I believe cannot be created by home cooks (certainly not on the stove).

Store-bought garlic jars are treated to be safe, though I don't know if they can become contaminated when you open them and leave them out on the counter. My guess is this is probably not common, otherwise it would happen with all sorts of food that is stored in oil and kept for long periods of time in the fridge.

Keep it in the fridge.

FYI, that only works for up to a week.

> stored in the refrigerator at 40 °F or lower for no more than 7 days

At temperatures above 38°, the toxin can be produced, and no amount of cooking will make it safe to eat.

In europe garlic in jar is "snobbish" option. It is 5x more expensive, produces a lot of waste and has brand and "proper bio" markers. Normal garlic you buy at streetmarket or grow yourself, is noname option for poor people.

streetmarket or grow yourself, is noname option for poor people.

In 'my' Europe, shopping at street markets and growing your own food is a typical rich people activity.

Where in "Europe"? The streetmarket here is super expensive, cheap garlic comes from the supermarket.

Poland, circa 1995

TIL jarred garlic exists. I don't think I have ever seen that in a store here (EU country), what I have seen is dried, powdered garlic. I'll try and find this next time I'm in a store.

I like getting peeled whole cloves. Peeling is the time consuming part of garlic prep and alternatives like smashing the heads to extract the garlic always end up with bits of skin still attached when I've tried it. Mincing already peeled cloves is no trouble at all.

pre-minced garlic in a jar does lose some flavor and freshness, so I've taken to buying a big bag of garlic every few months, skinning it (break heads down to cloves, cut the ends off each clove, put it in a sealed metal container like two bowls pressed together, and shake your ass off). Then you mince it (like, in a food processor) and freeze it flat in a sandwich bag. When the bag has been in the freezer for about half an hour, score it with the back of a knife, so each "cube" is about the size of about half a clove of garlic. Then you can break off a few pieces for each recipe. The benefit of this method versus pre-frozen mince is you can be sure there's no filler.

Not that I would turn my nose up at a home-cooked meal with pre-minced garlic, but this is the method I learned from an aged family member.

"In Defence of..." articles considered harmful.

All a needless justification of resisting peer pressure instead of letting it bounce off and enjoying life.

I use minced garlic all the time. It even comes in a squeeze bottle now which I find amazing. I use granulated garlic as well. There is nothing wrong with this. The results speak for themselves. People worry too damn much about what other people think.

- In defense of late binding: How static type zealots almost ruined my love of programming

- In defense of garbage collection: how explicit memory pedantists almost ruined my joy of programming

- In defense of files: how everything-is-an-SQL-table almost ruined my joy of programming

…

I'd buy this if everything-is-an-SQL-table was a near-universal opinion online.

Or if any of those fringe zealot opinions were anywhere near as commonplace as the jarlic hate is.

Is there some hive of schizo-DBAs that I don't know about?

We’ve been using the Dorot Gardens crushed garlic. It is crushed and pressed into a tray with little cubic depressions to hold the garlic and then frozen. It’s like tiny garlic ice cubes. We get them at Trader Joe’s. Each cube packs a wallop of garlic flavor and is indistinguishable from crushed fresh. The melt easily in some hot pasta or when sautéing vegetables. My husband still wants to use fresh garlic but it takes enough extra time that we don’t. These garlic cubes are ways ready to use and it makes a big difference.

I've largely converted to frozen too I think. Getting rid of that always-slightly-present jarred-flavor-weirdness is nice, the cost is more than close enough to not care, and it lasts practically forever because it's frozen.

Fresh garlic is such a pain to deal with, the minor flavor improvement is just nowhere near worth the increase in effort, or ingredient loss due to it growing old before use.

I'm obsessed with the stuff! The crushed ginger is also excellent for curries and stir -fries.

America's Test Kitchen recently released a review video "The Best Substitutes for Fresh Garlic":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anbWTqJMQC8

Also, from a few years ago, "The Science of Garlic and How to Make the Best Garlic Bread" with Dan Souza in their 'science-y series':

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxM3tZkwNKA

There's nothing snobbish about the claim that food cooked with fresh ingredients are more flavourful and nutritious. Nobody can also deny that processed foods save a lot of cooking time. But they are often unhealthier (in the long term) because of all the salt, sugar, artificial flavours and preservatives that are used in it. And they are often always costlier. It's the last 2 things that really irk me - I recently bought some cocoa powder, and was hard-pressed to find any brand selling it without artificial cocoa flavouring. These cheap artificial flavourings allow the processed food industry to reduce or substitute the original ingredient with a cheaper alternative, while ensuring the artificial flavouring doesn't let us know the difference. This is one of the major reasons people who really love cooking avoid processed foods, and often prefer fresh ingredients.

All that said, people like the author should learn to care less about the unimportant / irrelevant opinions of others, especially strangers. And learn to diplomatically handle such opinions. (After all, pride and snobbery does creep in when we learn a skill that we enjoy and become better at. I confess that I am an occasional snob too since I learned cooking! As is the author, even if she doesn't realise it ...).

Maybe the author should try James May's cooking show/book[1]. It's a decidedly anti-snob take on cooking, with a focus on amateurs ("You wouldn't be reading this if you knew how to cook") and convenience, unabashedly using low class preserved ingredients that last forever in storage (spam, alphabet pasta).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_May:_Oh_Cook

Everything is about trade offs. Raw ingredients are the peak of versatility because it's the base from which all the variations come from. But it takes effort to get those variations. Grating carrots can be annoying so maybe some people buy bags of grated carrots. But you won't be getting any carrot sticks from that bag. Mincing garlic is annoying so garlic can come pre-minced. You obviously won't be getting sliced or whole garlic or black garlic from the pre-minced garlic. Also, products oxidise and lose their flavour quickly. I prefer buying whole peppercorns and using a pepper grinder. Some people take it a step further and buy whole spices and temper+grind them. The garlic will lose flavour quickly when minced so it needs to be stored in either oil or vinegar or frozen. That again will limit its versatility. If it's in olive oil, I may not want to use it in east Asian cooking. Also, convenience products add sugar and salt which again is something that you may not want. In my opinion, if you know what's in it and you're happy with any limitations it creates, then by all means use it. I imagine cooking "snobs" like cooking and value the versatility of the raw ingredients. When given a bunch of raw ingredients the world opens up with possibilities.

This! Whole garlic bulbs (as well as onions, potatoes etc. etc.) will last for months if stored properly, the "convenience" versions need extra packaging, have to be refrigerated or cooled, and still can't be stored for very long. You don't have to dice the garlic by hand though, you can use a garlic press.

Before anyone calls me a snob, I use some convenience products too, e.g. pre-cut and mixed salad - I hate cleaning salad, plus in this case the convenience product has more or less the same shelf life as an uncut salad. Also, after several quiche disasters where we ended up eating "minced quiche" because it leaked or refused to be removed in one piece, I am a huge fan of convenience quiche crust - tasty, crispy, and (almost) 100% leak-proof!

If you go down the "only use base products" rabbit hole, you also have to make your own pasta, because after all that's also a convenience product...

> Whole garlic bulbs (as well as onions, potatoes etc. etc.) will last for months if stored properly,

Mine have a lot of green material growing in them by like 3 weeks, max. Fridge, not fridge, doesn't matter. What am I doing wrong?

My potatoes and onions also sure as shit don't last "months". Again, maybe 3 weeks before they're getting iffy, often sooner. Yes, kept in the dark, not like open on the counter in sunlight.

Unless you're eating it raw, there's no problem with minced garlic or prepeeled garlic. Yes, it has slightly less flavor, but you can just add more of it if you want.

This article is really weird. This person developed insecurity about using jarred garlic, because they saw (or imagined) that someone in college looked at them wrong when they used it. Then they proceeded to look out for comments about jarred garlic on Twitter, because what people say on Twitter is important. And then they complain that the snobs don't think about disabled people when they behave snobby. What a surprise. When I say that running regularly is healthy for you, I also don't think about people who don't have legs, have deformed legs, or have other disabilities preventing them from running. What sort of a complaint is that?

Overall, it gives the impression that this person actively searched for something to feel insecure about and then wrote a looong article about it.

Also, it's weird to label mincing garlic yourself as snobby, when it's the cheap option done by almost everyone. Forget about finding jarred garlic in a pleb fridge. Hipsters with creative eating habits? Much more likely. And for people without applicable disabilities, jarred garlic doesn't save all that much time. Time spent mincing garlic barely registers compared to other activities in the kitchen. And jarred garlic is A LOT more expensive[1]. But if you have disabilities, it may be the rational choice, yup, no argument about that. And even when it's not the rational choice, who cares?

When I cook, I don't check on Twitter if my way of cooking is approved by snobs. Go on detox from Twitter. Your life will get much better than by fighting imagined ableism.

[1]: No surprise here really. Fresh food is almost always several times cheaper than processed food. After all, it's less work to make it.

> Overall, it gives the impression that this person actively searched for something to feel insecure about and then wrote a looong article about it.

Hello and welcome to modern long-form thinkpieces. The Walrus kinda seems like it wants to be a Canadian version of The Atlantic, so it's par for the course.

This sentence in the article quite contradict with itself: "In a culture obsessed with the right and wrong way of doing things" But it also have this negative sentiment towards culture and point out "the right and wrong way of doing things".

The only way for me to make it consistent is that it is a relative self-reflective view that "I am also part of the culture and this is destined to happen".

This.

Someone who writes 2400 words on how hot takes on social media about garlic are wrong doesn't really have a cooking hobby, they have a cooking-themed blogging hobby.

> The only way for me to make it consistent is that it is a relative self-reflective view that "I am also part of the culture and this is destined to happen".

Consider the view that American culture is devoted largely to worrying about how evil American culture is, and that this is dysfunctional.

Forget whether it's accurate. As an American, you can't technically take this view without being part of the problem you're identifying.

But if it's enough of a problem, maybe it's worth sucking up the logical issues.

I make pizza using a frozen Newman’s cheese pie which I then top with prosciutto, shredded sharp white cheddar, pesto, thinly sliced onion, and sometimes pickled jalapeños. Then I cook it on a pizza steel at 420 degrees until it’s just shy of burnt.

It’s amazing. I’ve made pizza professionally (long story) and I sometimes make my own dough and sauce etc and the result is great - but not _better_ than the above.

> ... on a pizza steel at 420 degrees ...

95% of the world uses Celsius, and when I fire my pizza oven up it's in the 400-450 Celsius range, where I can approach proper Napoli style pizzas, using a 24-30 hour prep poolish dough base.

Are you talking Celsius or the archaic Fahrenheit?

If the former, then I'd love to know more about 'professional' pizzas not coming close to store-bought ready-made bases with some toppings.

> proper Napoli style

That is but one style of pizza, by no means the best, and certainly not what you make with a frozen grocery-store cheese puck at 420degF.

My results resemble (but exceed!) bar pies: https://www.pmq.com/colony-grill/

Today I've learned about puck cheese, thanks. It sounds .. interesting.

I've rented in places with residential-grade ovens that have reached 250C, which have been excellent for pizzas, but typically I've had them max out around 220, where it's more challenging to get a great result.

The 'razer thin' (seemingly zero crust, certainly no edge gradient) on that link you sent would probably be easier to replicate in a residential oven - especially with a steel. (I've not used one of those, only stones.)

Neapolitan pizza is the worst type of pizza

Well that's simply not true.

In America, most people just have "ovens", not "pizza ovens". And they generally can't go as high as 450C, unless maybe you put them in "self cleaning" mode (which stands a good chance of filling your kitchen with smoke if you haven't cleaned your oven recently.)

But yes, ideally a pizza is cooked hot and fast.

I think for most people, in most places, ovens are more common than pizza ovens, but the observation that 'In America ...' kind of emphasises my point that not everyone's in America (or more specifically, the subset of North America that is the USA), so assumptions around uncommon temperature units are ill-advised.

One hundred percent agree (or 144/144 if you prefer) that pizza should be cooked hot & fast. I'm aiming for 90s, though I've yet to get the air / floor temperature balance just right, and typically end up around 180s at best.

An $8 frozen pizza for 1 person is sometimes better than ordering takeout. I usually have at least one in my freezer at all times.

Personally, I go for the sausage and pepperoni, and add some extra garlic powder, tomato powder, cayenne, basil, and some honey before putting it on a preheated sheet.

Food and your personal desire to cook and eat it is so so subjective that the idea that anyone can try and say you are doing something wrong that you have done before and enjoy...well it's silly.

The entire industry around cooking and especially the glorification of shows like hells kitchen is to the detriment of food everywhere. You might as well try to critique how someone hugs their wife.

Step 1: Invent strawman about how the cruel world is mocking you for using the wrong food products whereas absolutely nobody actually cares.

Step 2: Write article demonstrating your deep bravery in using commercial food products that huge numbers of people use.

What a real life super hero. I hope one day I will have the emotional fortitude and depth of character to open a jar of garlic.

We have ~4000 heads of garlic in the ground at our little farm here, and are in our third year of selling garlic as a business.

But we still usually have a couple jars of store-bought pre-minced stuff in the cupboard. It comes in handy.

Blanket prohibitions and snobbery are just stupid.

For me the decision is based on whether the option has wasteful packaging or not. Garlic in a jar? No problem. Mushrooms pre-sliced in a plastic package, no way Jose. Gimme those ones I picked out myself and put into a paper bag.

I'm a bit of a food snob and recently bought a jar of minced-in-oil-garlic… got tired of finding green sprouts in freshly purchased bulbs (it's overripe, toss it). I give up.

Funny how an article about jarred garlic & ableism quickly devolves into a discussion of making coffee.

My friend Jerry & I are preparing a series of articles testing whether coffee drinkers (and especially, coffee snobs) can actually taste the difference between the outputs of various choices in coffee brewing.

I would think the same technique would shut up some of the cooking snobs about other things: can you taste the difference between two identical dishes, one made with freshly chopped garlic and the other with jarred? (where the garlic is a fairly small component in the dish rather than a main actor, e.g. garlic bread?)

I use mostly fresh ingredients but not because of food snobs. If anything I'm the snob. I genuinely think it tastes better and I like to know exactly what I'm putting in to my food. Some things store better than others and are fine to use dried/frozen/preserved etc. A few things I can think of that cannot be substituted: coffee (freshly ground makes all the difference), basil (freshly picked and properly prepared), coriander (freshly ground), cumin (seeds must be used whole of freshly ground), tomatoes (fresh or tinned whole tomatoes taste way better than any pre-made sauce or passata).

If the author is here, please look into getting a first rib resection for your TOS. I had my right side done in January and the other will follow in October. My symptoms (and risk of a pulmonary embolism) have disappeared. Check if yours is just nervous or also vascular/arterial and if there's an extra rib or your shoulders are just oddly formed inside like mine. If you can, find a surgeon who specializes in it to avoid them redoing all the scans. It may change your life.

I'd venture to say that internet food snobs have also ruined proper food lessons.

Snobbery can be good or bad. At its best, it allows people to learn from the experience of others and protects against mistakes that aren't bad for the individual but bad for the overall system. But snobs for the sake of signaling status not only make everyone more unhappy, they also ruin the concept that experts actually exist.

The right thing is almost never the opposite of the wrong thing.

You can use jarred garlic all you like. If someone gives you shit, tell them GFY.

I use it once in a while, e.g. for marinades.

One method of crushing that I don't see here: if you have drinking glasses with heavy glass bottoms (most of them, from what I can tell), you can just smash the clove with that. Peel the skin, then smash the clove again. Now it might be usable as is, but if not, you can chop it pretty easily. I've never broken a glass that way.

I greatly dislike the idea of using a glass object as a hammer.

The side of a knife works very well, not sure why it's not universal...

Okey dokey, then. You don't have to do it.

It is not that difficult to use and store fresh onions and garlic.

I think none of them should go in a jar, I believe they emit some sulphuric fumes that makes them smell really bad when they are put in a closed jar. Have you ever tried putting half of an onion in the fridge?

Corn has a similar problem, i don't like put that in the fridge as leftovers.

Most other things are fine. Cilantro/coriander is ok to put in a jar, but the remaining taste is 1% of the fresh .

> Have you ever tried putting half of an onion in the fridge?

I do it all the time. I just put it in a sealed glass container. Use it again in the next day or two. No big deal. Longer than that and the onion starts to soften, but can be still usable.

> Have you ever tried putting half of an onion in the fridge?

I wrap it in aluminum foil and never have a problem.

Bonus: touching the foil neutralizes the smell of onion on my hands.

Thank you for the article, although I don't tend to be too disparaging about these types of ingredients (I think) it's always a good reminder to be open minded and aware that you don't know others situations. And on top of that there's absolutely nothing wrong with making tradeoffs for convenience...and its also not necessarily good to take what people claim are tradeoffs as absolute truth.

You opened up a jar of object-oriented programming to make your stir fry and your roommate sneered that you hadn't used functional programming. After doing some reading online you come to the conclusion that real programmers don't use object-oriented programming, they only use fresh, all-natural functions and monads!

Every human endeavor, even the supposedly logical ones, have their idiosyncrasies.

This article is long, funny, and has some excellent tips for us seniors who need a little shortcut, or are just having a nice, lazy morning.

I'm not sure I agree with the basic premise though. Maybe I'm not bothered what others think, but for me, half of 'learning how to cook' is finding what works for you. I now buy 'proper' garlic, but I still buy the cheapest tins of tomatoes because that's what works for me.

I buy the frozen ginger and garlic cubes TJs has and that’s been a revelation. Fresh taste, no prep, only slight modifications to use. The snobs can go rub stainless steel with their garlic scented hands!

I think also what happens is that some people feel that the comparison is between doing everything from scratch and taking a couple shortcuts. Sure - not using jarred garlic or some other timesaver won't taste as good as starting with the original ingredients.

But really, it's more often between taking shortcuts and not cooking at all. When I have time, I love doing everything myself. But after a long work day, I often don't have the energy. But if there's something like a meal kit that I know I can cook, that'll stop me from having dinner delivered.

I only have the freshest kipper during breakfast.

To care much about garlic itself, when the flavor is 99% based on how long you heat it, would be a pinnacle of snobbishness.

plus, though I'm not certain, doesn't the process of breaking down garlic change the flavor itself? freshly broken down garlic vs jarred broken down garlic, the latter I'd imagine to be "richer"

Crushed garlic in a jar is a pretty common ingredient in Korean cooking AFAIK. The garlic gets milder after being aged for a bit.

I always resisted garlic in a tube or jar because it tasted a little off to me. (And, sure, maybe because I was a bit snobby.)

But my supermarket started stocking Doro frozen minced garlic (and ginger!) and it's a game changer. Tastes the same to me, and so much easier. Haven't bought a head of garlic in months.

* Don't toast a fresh bagel

* Don't chill red wine

* blah blah

Fuck the snobs. Don't let an asshole ruin what you brings you a little enjoyment. If you think plain yellow mustard on your well done steak tastes like heaven then by all means have at it.

My only advice would be to occasionally try something new, withstanding the "avoid assholes" part.

My wife once bought us tickets to a cookery class. The leader, a professional chef, told us that he never minced garlic. He would take a couple of bulbs, peel the cloves, bung them in a blender with some oil, then pot up the mix and put it in the fridge for the next weeks' use.

I like to make burgers. Mostly, I have used just salt and pepper for seasoning, but sometimes also onion and paprika powder.

Then I realized the cheap “grill spice mix” contains exactly that. Why not just use that? It is very convenient to only have to shake one can instead of 4.

A game changer is a little silicon tube from amazon in which you can roll the garlic cloves and the skin peels right off. I can run through a bulb in less than a minute, and then you can mince the garlic and freeze it into ice cubes if needed for later.

Gently squeezing the clove under the blade of the knife on the cutting-board and it's easy to peel that way too. I find it works just fine, especially in combination with just chopping it afterwards (instead of using a garlic crusher).

I don't like to crush the garlic because I tend to grate it

Be careful with garlic in jars, there is risk of botulism : https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/stinking_facts_about_garlic

To me the delivery mechanism of the stored garlic is not that important as long as it's not stale or oxidized. really gross. I also know from talking to most people that what smells bad in garlic to me smells fine to them.

I eat as much like it's 1930 as possible, but have no issue with garlic in a jar, as right now it's a 'thing' and quite versatile. This, too, will pass though and I'll be back to real garlic soon enough.

I'm astonished that something like jarred garlic exists. I have seen powdered garlic, but jarred wasn't something I remember seeing in Poland. We always have source of 'normal' garlic.

Is it popular in other countries?

Snobs have always existed, and they love to hate on things the "common man" likes. But McDonalds and Budweiser continue to make millions, so it's pretty obvious that the snobs are in the minority.

I recall a documentary on where this peeled garlic comes from. It involved prison labor in China, the chemistry of the garlic disolves finger nails, and I believe they would bite the ends off.

Funny that everybody has examples in all sorts of fields, but the exact same thing is very present with programming. I guess we're all snobs if we don't acknowledge that.

> They’re dismissing those of us with disabilities.

Or, really, just those of us who are "not them". Elitism, cultism, gatekeeping etc. exists in all realms and hobbies.

The time taken to write the article must be orders of magnitude more than human being needs to spend on peeling and squeezing garlic in their lifetime.

I always have minced garlic on-hand. You never know when you'll open up a fresh bulb only for it to be a dud.

But I also drink Kroger-brand instant coffee happily.

Garlic in a jar is the React of cooking.

Can you explain further? Whenever I try to create abstractions around alliums it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

It's technically 'cheating' but it's perfectly acceptable to most people because it gets the job done as well as you could do it without it. People who complain about it are snobs.

Also, I use an ungodly amount of it.

I’m 28 y.o and this is the first time I hear about garlic in a jar. U.S.A never ceases to amaze me.

I went to a seafood barbecue course. They told me professional chefs use things like this all the time.

"Cooking should be a pleasure, if it's a job get a takeaway" - Marco Pierre-White

In general, better to cook at home than eat out, from a health and calorie perspective.

TIL "pre-sliced mushrooms" is a thing.

I have IBS. There is no food worse for me than garlic. It's delicious and I wish I could eat it. High in FODMAPs apparently.

The author's main problem is her sensitivity, not a culture of "ableist" cooks. Nobody should be this concerned with how random internet users care about their method of preparing garlic. And of course YouTube cooks promote the "best" method even when it might be unnecessarily time consuming - because they are cooking to make a nice video, not a time efficient meal.

The part about her causing herself pain by mincing garlic shows well how she is too worried about other people's opinions (who aren't even present when she does it) over factors that influence her health.

Did you only read the first page of the article? She describes a physical condition that actually does prevent her from chopping fresh garlic:

> A repetitive strain injury led me to develop thoracic outlet syndrome. Pain shot through my forearms and into my fingers when I did simple tasks. My hands often went numb. My elbows ached and seized. Looking down at anything—a book, a cutting board—hurt my neck and shoulders and worsened the rest of my symptoms.

The article is actually interesting from a human perspective: many disabilities are invisible, or only manifest in ways that appear trivial on their own but that exacerbate feelings of inadequacy, inauthenticity, etc. She doesn't dispute the fact that fresh chopped garlic is better; she's found herself aware of a source on inadequacy that feels trivial to everyone else. I think that's a pretty relatable sentiment.

People are getting more sensitive to the opinions of others, and I am not sure that is necessarily a bad thing. It does mean we might want to be a bit more careful with how we express opinions, considering others a bit. I also don't think that is necessarily bad.

Being sensitive to the opinion of others implies trying to see things their way. It means increased communication, empathy.

Being neurotic about if people agree with how you cook garlic does the opposite. It’s founded in insecurity and achieves the opposite.

Sensitivity really is the problem. Sometimes people mock me for drinking instant coffee. Instead of letting that hurt my feelings, I laugh in their face and ask if they're volunteering to make coffee for me.

Instant coffee is just freeze-dried coffee, it's not my favorite way of making coffee but it's focusing on the wrong thing (technique over product).

I'd take instant coffee from good beans over perfectly brewed coffee (IMO this is espresso or pour-over in a pinch) with shitty beans.

A pour over coffee only takes a few minutes to make. I can't imagine you are saving much time in this case, and the quality difference is substantial. But I'm not judging you, I know people that just like instant coffee better.

Sensitivity is a real problem.

When I was younger I would sometimes feel deeply hurt when someone expressed disapproval of something I did or something about me, and as I've grown older realized that sometimes people don't like the way I do things, or don't like me, and that's okay.

I don't have a really specific point to make here, but it may be worth considering that snobby humor is sometimes really hurtful to some people, and telling someone "you're too sensitive" is probably not helping them grow into a more secure person with a healthier level of sensitivity.

Occasionally I make too much coffee so there will be about a cup leftover. Instead of pouring it down the drain I’ll just keep it and the next time I’d like a cup I put it in the microwave for a bit to warm it up.

The looks of utter disgust and horror I’ve received always put a smile on my face.

I'm most assuredly not a coffee snob (Folger's? Bring it on), but I just don't like the taste of instant. I will say that an AeroPress is one of my best investments for a quick, good tasting cup of coffee (faster and cleaner than my previous plastic pour-over thing that cost me $2).

i like instant coffee. It tastes better. To me.

A lot of fancy coffees taste terrible. But we aren't allowed to say that because how can it be you spent 10x more to get a far worse product?

Unless missiles are raining down on your kitchen or there is a famine in your area, there's no defense for using garlic in a jar. Never. Ever. Learn how to peel and then crush, slice, and mince garlic quickly. There are a variety of techniques. Watch some videos on YouTube.

If you are desperate to save time, you may use canned tomatoes. But that should be a last resort. Fresh garlic and fresh onions are two of life's simple pleasures. Seriously.

Most of the year, canned tomatoes are much better than fresh. Except when they are locally in season, then fresh tomatoes are amazing.

I'm guessing you didn't actually read the article, just commented from the headline, because I think disability is a pretty good excuse to use pre-prepared ingredients.

Well, good thing people don't need your approval for their cooking. You should still stop spreading rhetoric like this because, as the central topic of the article demonstrates, some people will still take it to heart even though their cooking is none of your business.

A lot of these 'lazy' or convenience foods aren't just useful in times of famine or war, but they make it easier for those who are less able to cook from scratch. Somebody with dexterity issues will benefit from pre-prepared foods.

if garlic is the main flavour e.g. in Cacik (ja-jik) in Turkey then yes you want to use fresh. Otherwise it really depends on where it's supposed to sit in terms of importance. On the whole though, a lot of classic foods can survive a bit of imperfection and still be delicious. Why would you crap on someone for taking an easy route when they need to if the food is still tasty?

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