Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Fitzie,

It gets faster the more times you've done it. It only takes me about a minute, and I've seen professional chefs get a 2mm mince in seconds.

If I were to mince up a big batch using my immersion blender chopper, how to store and how long to store in the fridge?
Nance

I usually mince single cloves of garlic with my favorite paring knife, but the real reason I am resurrecting this topic is to report on an exchange that recently took place on ATK Radio between CPK and Bridget Lancaster. Begins at 13:30 into show.



If I could draw, there would be a cartoon depicting Chris Kimball-armed only with a garlic press-battling a kitchen full of chefs bristling with Solingen blades.

ATK Radio Show: What You Don't know about Coffee Beans

I'm not convinced Chris is a very good cook. A good businessman, maybe. But he's always purporting something that IMO is just plain wrong....easy, but wrong. Garlic is better minced IMO, and the opinion of chefs worldwide.

Amy

Promoting short cuts in the kitchen is a way to make cooking more accessible to home cooks, so ATK came up with using a garlic press instead a knife. Interesting that Bridget (the non-trained chef) dislikes garlic presses. It seems a matter of economy and not only taste. By the time a chef found a garlic press, removed the skin and pressed, the chef could have had several cloves minced given his knife skills.

There is no doubt in my mind, however, that Chri$ is a good bu$ine$$man!

Amen.

Amy

I'm amazed there are three pages (at this writing) of mincing garlic.
After reading through everything, wow, I'm wondering if I need to sharpen my knife skills.
True -- I'm a home cook and not a pro, . . . so what do I know.

Since I like using lemons, I have this neat zester thingy.
Question: is using a zesting tool like the MicroPlane considered inappropriate in the prep of garlic?

Tunaoue --

I like to use it for raw garlic in salads, etc.

I use a press and silently send an apology to Amy every time I do. Or when I pulse an onion in my f/p (although to be fair that's cause I'm rendering unfindable by the smaller set who like the taste but not the bits)

I've even done the Barefoot Contessa thing of dropping cloves in the feed tube of the f/p when I need a lot. My press doesn't require the cloves to be peeled, but I do it anyway and it doesn't take long. Maybe one day I'll dedicate some time to learning to do it via a knife....but not in the near future.

Tuna- I've used the rasp before but it's way slower than my press, the pieces are almost indisernable (sp?) and I tend to catch my nails on it, so the press is better for me.

I've slowly become a convert to doing it with a knife. I pretty much never use the press now, unless I want something that is closer to a paste which is pretty rare in my case. I think for a single or two clove, the knife is vastly superior almost entirely due to the cleanup cost/yield ratio.