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.
For soups, stews and stir-frys, it's easiest to cut tofu into cubes, small or large. Cubes have flat sides that make good contact with the pan, and brown well. Browning the cubes on all four sides in a non-stick skillet is a good way to improve tofu's bland reputation. Since most tofu comes in rectangular blocks, cubing it is easy to do.Start by cutting the block in half.Depending on what size cubes you want, cut each half in half (2 cuts -- one on each side of the first cut) or into thirds (4 cuts -- 2 on each side of the first cut).Rotate the block 90 degrees and repeat.To make the final cut, you can either hold the knife parallel to the cutting board and slide it through the center, or turn the tofu up on end and slice perpendicular to the cutting board like you see here. It's not hard to keep the pieces together if you use both hands.
Cornstarch is a silky smooth powder made from the starchy part of the corn kernel known as the endosperm.
Most commonly used in cooking as a thickener for gravies, soups, sauces, pie fillings and puddings, cornstarch does not alter the flavor of a recipe or cloud the consistency of a dish.
Whisk cornstarch with cold water to make a paste (called a slurry) before adding it to a recipe to prevent lumps from forming.
Cornstarch can be used in baking and in gluten-free cooking as a substitute for small quantities of flour. When substituting, note that 1 tablespoon of cornstarch equals 2 tablespoons of all-purpose flour.
Ginger's brown outer peel looks tough, but it's not. It's so thin and light that you don't need a knife or vegetable peeler to peel it.
To start, break or cut off the the amount of ginger you need. Slice off any small protruding limbs to make the main piece easier to peel.
Hold the piece of ginger in one hand. With the tip of a spoon, scrape away the ginger's peel.
You'll be surprised by how little effort it takes to remove it. Because spoon tip is dull, it easily takes off the soft peel without wasting much of the aromatic flesh.
Once you've peeled the ginger, you're ready to prep it further.
Reference: How much is a thumb of ginger? (Cookthink)
Reference: How to mince ginger (Cookthink)
