— Kathleen Ciolek

So there's a lot of debate on this and garlic presses of gotten a lot of bad rap, especially in the last 10 years. Now, I understand why to a point because typically when you're pushing garlic through a garlic press it has a lot of little holes that are in the inside of it and when you push it through the garlic kind of comes out and like spaghetti like kind of structure which is kind of weird, you know, and it'll break apart because you know, it's kind of structured like an onion but you get these kind of like tubes of garlic which is kind of weird texture wise and it'll also get a lot left in there and also leaves all this kind of residue on the inside of it too. You're not sure what to do with it. I honestly do own a garlic press I barely ever use it but when I do I usually chop back over it again now, there's an article I read on Serious Eats recently. That was actually quite good talking about the difference between the flavor profile of garlic, press versus Mincing it with your knife versus using a mortar and pedestal and the flavor differences actually came up pretty different, which is interesting. I will typically use a knife to mince my garlic to be able to get it to go small. If I needed to be a puree. I'll actually take this side of my knife and after you know, I typically put a garlic glue on my cutting board and then I'll smash it with my knife and then mince it but then if I need to puree I'll actually just take my knife and kind of do a smoothing over the top of that to be able to make it into a paste as well mortar and pedestal will be just fine too. Now as far as the garlic press goes you can use it if it's what gets you in the kitchen that's totally fine. I would typically rock my knife over a little bit to do a little mincing of that to make sure you're not getting any kind of weird chunkiness or those kind of like spaghetti tube some talking about from the garlic press as well. You will see a little bit of flavor difference too. So, um, you know, you're getting more surface area from the minced versus the breast as well and the Press you're kind of pressing juices and the oils the natural oils that come out of it and you're leaving a lot of that in your garlic press so you're gonna get a little bit more. Were from just your minced garlic as well.