Garlic is a delicious and healthy addition to any dish, but peeling it can be a real pain. If you’ve ever tried to peel garlic by hand, you know how frustrating it can be to get every single clove out of the skin. The good news is that there are a few different strategies to peel garlic that you can use to make the process a lot easier.
Read on to discover different methods for peeling garlic, hopefully, quickly and easily!
Ways to Peel Garlic
If you have used garlic in cooking for some time, you probably have your own technique for peeling garlic cloves. Standard techniques are mostly determined by your familiarity and past successes, but also mainly by how much garlic needs to be peeled at any one time.
For recipes such as pickling garlic, this step is amplified many times over as you need to set all of those cloves free ahead of integrating all the ingredients. So you will appreciate how this step can then become the most time-consuming of the whole recipe.
Here are a few different ways of peeling the garlic that you may want to consider:
Peel garlic long-hand –
Separating the peel from the clove using your fingers with or without a small knife. Oh, your poor fingers…
The crushing way to peel garlic
This could involve cutting a whole bulb of garlic in half horizontally and then hitting and crushing from the skin side to release the collection of half-cloves.
More commonly this technique involves hitting each clove of garlic with the flat side of a knife; this is probably one of the most popular methods for regular cooking use. The downside to using it includes that this can take a lot of effort. Also,as you know, this almost inevitably results in the clove itself being crushed. This is good if this is how you need/prefer it for your recipe, but it becomes more of an issue when you need the cloves whole.
Shaking in a Jar to peel garlic
You put the cloves into a sealed glass jar and shake them vigorously to loosen the skin on the cloves. It does work and can be fun for kids to help with, but again takes a lot of effort for larger amounts of cloves. It does give you a workout for your arms though…
The ‘Bowl Shaker’ method to peel garlic
This works best when the skins are already dryer and looser.
You will need two metal bowls of the same size. Put the head of garlic into one bowl and add the second bowl edge-to-edge to form a ball shape. Then, shake it like mad until the skins separate from the cloves. You skin more garlic cloves at a time, this way.
But again involves a workout, and you need two metal bowls of the same size and the skills to hold them together in the bowl shape while dancing around your kitchen shaking the bowl…
Microwave garlic peeling
With this method, you put a whole head of garlic into the microwave and set it on high for 20 seconds. This makes it easier to pop the cloves out of the skins. If you do have to give it a hand, it is a lot easier to do. Quick and effective.
Peel garlic by blanching
Separate the cloves from the garlic bulbs and add them to a bowl. Boil some water, and then pour this boiling water over the garlic cloves, cover the bowl with a tea towel, leaving for 1 minute. Remove the cloves with a slotted spoon and leave to cool.
Once the garlic cloves are cooled, you can remove the skins with ease. Effectively helps to peel large amounts of garlic cloves, but takes a bit longer than the speedy microwave method.
There are many ways to peel garlic cloves, and the method you choose should be based on your needs, tools and time.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what method you use as long as your garlic is peeled and ready to be used in your recipe.
So pick whichever works best for you and get cooking!