FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Garlic overkill is possible — and common
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor
I'm going to take a radical and, some people will say, indefensible position here.
Ready?
Yes, there IS such a thing as too much garlic. And even the right amount of garlic badly handled is too much garlic.
Certain foods achieve a reputation for being so wonderful that too much is never enough. Garlic is one, butter is another and lately foie gras has become the overused ingredient du jour.
What prompted this garlic diatribe was the arrival on my desk of a new edition of "The Garlic Lovers' Cookbook" compiled by The Gilroy Garlic Festival Association (Celestial Arts/Tenspeed, paperback, $14.95). Not that there's a thing wrong with this book. The recipes, compiled from more than 20 years of Garlic Festival cooking competitions are well-tested, many are quite simple and interesting and — here's a shocker — most DON'T call for 10 bulbs of garlic.
Some background: In the the 1970s, when the foodie trend was in its infancy, garlic was viewed as a pretty out-there ingredient. Most home cooks didn't use fresh garlic and a few grains of garlic salt or garlic powder qualified a recipe as "exotic." I vividly remember, about this time, coming across James Beard's famous recipe for Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic and experiencing a gourmet epiphany when I realized that roasting garlic is an alchemy on the order of turning mustard into butter.
In those unsophisticated days, "gourmet" (the word foodie hadn't been invented) too often translated into "the one who knows more about cooking than you do and delights in shocking you with weird food preferences or combinations."
The Gilroy Garlic Festival was founded in 1979 in a garlic-growing region in Northern California, and it was a
smash hit from Day1, attracting 15,000 people when 5,000 were expected and becoming an immediate media darling. Unfortunately, the festival became a place where the "never too much" idea blossomed and grew like a, well, a "stinking rose" — a name for garlic that the festival helped to popularize.
Here's my point: Garlic, however distinctive and important, is an ingredient like any other. Except on occasion, it is not meant to dominate all other flavors in a dish. It must not be incinerated in too-hot oil until dark brown and bitter (as entirely too many of the Italian restaurants in Hawai'i routinely do), but rather sweated slowly so that it "melts." You must learn when to mince garlic, when to mash or press it, when to slice it and when to roast it to get the best effect in various recipes.
And, no matter what Emeril says or does, there is such a thing as too much.
