Sliced or chopped garlic is nowhere near as potent as crushed, but it depends what you want from it
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What’s the best way to prepare garlic: chop, crush or mince? And what about the little central shoot – should we discard that, as some chefs tell us to?
Hilde, West Sussex
The approach you choose depends more than you might think on what you’re cooking, and on the role you want the garlic to play in it. Put simply, that’s because the more you process garlic, the stronger it will be. I’ll spare Hilde too much by way of spoddy science speak, other than to say that, as culinary egghead Harold McGee points out in his epic On Food & Cooking, when you cut into a bulb of garlic, it sets off a chemical reaction between two of the allium’s key components (allinase and cycteine, seeing as you asked), which in turn releases sulphur compounds. This means the less you damage the bulb, the less sulphur is released, which is why sliced or chopped garlic is nowhere near as potent, or indeed pungent, as crushed, and why whole bulbs stay so gloriously sweet after roasting.
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