When you want a dish to have quintessential garlic flavor that permeates each bite, mince it. You can mince with a knife, or a garlic press.
Either way, you need to free the individual cloves. To do that, press down on the head with the heel of your palm. Apply firm, even pressure so the cloves don't fly all over the place.
To peel an individual clove, cut of the hard stem end where the clove attached to the bulb. Either stop the cut just short of the skin on the other side and peel the skin around to remove it, or make the cut all the way through and squeeze out the clove. The older the clove, the easier the skin releases.
You can also peel it by setting the side of your knife blade on the clove and pressing down until you feel the skin release, though not hard enough to pulverize it, or the skin will get mixed in with the garlic.
To mince with a knife, smash the peeled clove with the side of the knife. Then just run your knife back and forth across the smashed clove, chopping as you go until it's as fine as you like.
If you don't want individual little pieces of garlic and have a press, just put the whole peeled clove (or cloves, if you can fit them) in the press and squeeze. Use your knife to trim away any clinging garlic.
Tongs are the most useful tool in the kitchen.
Having a good pair of tongs is like having a heatproof robotic arm in the kitchen. Consider a partial list of things you can do with a pair of tongs: stir something in a sizzling pan; flip something in a sizzling pan; move something around in a sizzling pan; spear something in a sizzling pan; push something in a sizzling pan to check for doneness; hold something above a sizzling pan to taste it; take something out of a sizzling pan. And that's just around a sizzling pan. Standing around a grill or reaching inside an oven, tongs are critical.
You can spend a small fortune on specialty tongs, but you don't have to. OXO's Good Grips stainless steel tongs are inexpensive and probably as special as you’ll ever need.
So here's our public service announcement - buy tongs now.
You may have a Dutch oven and not even know it.
A Dutch oven is a large pot with an arched lid that offers extra room for cooking something like a pot roast or whole chicken.
Dutch ovens are available in a variety of shapes and materials. We like our enamel-coated cast iron Dutch oven from Le Creuset that is dishwasher-safe and can withstand 800F heat (if only our oven went so high). The heavy cast iron allows for browning a roast on the stove top and popping it in the oven for several hours, all the while evenly distributing the heat and allowing room for braising liquid.
Do you have to have a Dutch oven? No. A 6-quart tight-lidded pot will do. A good-quality Dutch oven is a luxury to use in the kitchen, though, so you might want to put one on your wish list.
Marjoram is oregano's calmer, sweeter fraternal twin. Oregano = zesty + peppery + lemony. Marjoram = delicate + floral + round. The two are often used interchangeably but if you get up in their mix you'll see some big differences.
Want to test the difference? Get a fresh sprig of marjoram and a fresh sprig of oregano. Tear an oregano leaf in half. Hold it up to your nose. Smell that piney resin? That jolt? It's sharp, isn't it? Almost one note.
Okay, wait a few minutes, then do the same thing with the marjoram. Smell the complexity? The spice is still there but it's perfumed, heady. Almost soapy. (If you use too much of it, that soapiness can take over a soup or sauce.)
So, can you use one in place of the other? Sure. If you use oregano when a recipe calls for marjoram (or vice versa), the flavors of the dish won't be wildly different. Still, we like to honor and explore the subtle character differences between the two.
Try some of our marjoram recipes or oregano recipes on Cookthink.
