Knowledge Base > Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

This event was on Tuesday, June 04, 2024 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern

Join Chef Dan Marek in his virtual office as he welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to Ask Anything – from cooking techniques to cours… Read More.

Recorded

Question:

Can you speak about when it is better to mince garlic and when it is OK to just use a garlic press?

— Maura Ema

Answer:

So a lot of, um, people are very antiar, uh, press and I'm not always one of those people, but it's definitely kind of a use case scenario. So when you use a garlic press, you're putting garlic into this little device and it's pressing out and giving it lots of different texture, uh, or lots of different surface area as it goes through there. Um, as opposed to when you're mincing it, you're gonna have a smaller amount of surface area on each little piece of garlic 'cause you're not able to get it down to like the macerated state, um, as the garlic press would. That being said, the garlic press is going to give you a more pronounced garlic flavor because all the oils and all of the garlic is, um, really coming out of there and you're, you're getting that to kind of come out all at once, um, before you even put it into your dish. Now a minced garlic, because it has, uh, you know, because it's actually minced like that, you're not gonna have as a pronounced garlic flavor, but you will bite when you bite into it. You'll actually, uh, even as you're cooking it, you'll, when you bite into it, it'll kind of release garlic as you're chewing it. So those are probably the two biggest things between those two, uh, forms of, uh, you know, preparing garlic. I typically will always mince it, but every so often, if I'm in a hurry, I'll actually use a garlic press as well too. Um, but yeah, that's the two biggest ones is, uh, one, you're gonna get a bigger garlic flavor from a garlic press, uh, but it will turn to dissipate as you cook it down a little bit more. If you're having a minced garlic, it'll spread out a little bit slower because of the less surface area.
Dan Marek

Dan Marek

Director of Plant-Based Culinary & Dev

rouxbe.com