• IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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        1 hour ago

        Sorry … garlic is almost automatic for me at this point when I cook, it’s almost like salt and pepper … I never think of it.

        And I’m at the point where I buy about 20lbs of garlic from my local farmer every fall (I just bought my supply a couple of weeks ago) to last me the winter.

          • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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            35 minutes ago

            I keep mine in a very loose burlap bag which my farmer gave me years ago … then I hang the bag on a hook from the ceiling in my basement (about six feet off the floor) where humidity lingers about 50-60% year round … no natural light and temps are about 17-20 Celsius year round.

            I learned that hanging is better because everything gets equal amounts of air. If you sit it on a shelf or near the floor, the bottom layer will get damp fast and give no air circulation. My farmer said that he had a few customers complain that their supply of garlic went bad midway through the winter … he suspected that they kept their bags on the floor or on a shelf.

            Last year I kept 20lbs starting from about October and I used the last of it at about June the following year with only about three or four bulbs going bad … and bad meaning they just shrivelled up and dried out.

        • DeadPixel@lemmy.zip
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          1 hour ago

          Wow & I thought I liked garlic, I feel amateur by those standards. Your food must taste amazing & I bet not a vampire in sight too!

          • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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            44 minutes ago

            I’m not exactly a gourmet cook, I’ve just been learning how to cook for years. One Italian friend of mine recommended that I should always try to get fresh garlic as much as I can because it is better. Canned, preserved, precut, minced, bottled garlic … or even dried, dehydrated garlic is not the best … not only does it not have as much of a strong garlic flavour, most of it comes from Asia and specifically China where it is produced cheaply and under very shady circumstances.

            Watch a Netflix documentary series called ‘Rotten’ … Season 1 Episode 3 is titled ‘Garlic Breath’ … and it details where a lot of cheap prepackaged garlic products come from … namely cheap Chinese prison labour where in some factories, prisoners are not allowed any sharp objects to peel the garlic by hand so they have to resort to using their fingernails, which they eventually wear out and then later resort to using their teeth.

            After watching all that … I really took my time to search for a local farmer and pay double the amount for fresh garlic and I just buy the stuff in bulk now because it’s cheaper in the long run.

  • Seasm0ke@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    My dad hated onions, he’d pick them out of his meals like a 5 year old. One day after I found a love for cooking in highschool this happened and he decided to try my dishes. He was very proud that he only picked out 3 onion pieces and kept the rest lol.

  • simulacra_procession@lemmy.today
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    5 hours ago

    Lol my mom used to tell me she’d come home exhausted from work and wouldn’t know what she was going to feed us, so she’d just put some garlic and onions in a pan to fry while she wound down and figure it out as she went. She said the smell at least made it seem like she had it all figured out, to us anyway

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      1 hour ago

      There’s a common joke about that. It goes something like: “A [Ukrainian] starts frying onion and garlic in a pan and only then starts thinking about what they want to make.”

      [Ukrainian] can be substituted for most other countries, to be honest.

      But, to be real, garlic shouldn’t be fried for that long IMO, so I’d only put in the garlic about 30s before I was ready to start adding all the other ingredients. But, with the onions, I’ve actually started onions more than 30 minutes before figuring out what else I wanted to make. That way they have a chance to get good and caramelized. That doesn’t work for every recipe, but it works for a lot of them.

    • EpicMuch@sh.itjust.works
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      5 hours ago

      My mom, who was a self admitted not-good cook would start these on the stove a bit before dad was set to come home. He’d be hungry but smelled too good and he would finish cooking for us

  • shalafi@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    Been trying to figure out how to explain to my little kids that they don’t like the taste of onions, they like the flavor.

    They love McDonald’s cheeseburgers, chips of all sorts, all with onions. They’re small, biting an onion is too much for their taste buds, so they think they hate onions.

    Anyone help me articulate the idea? LOL, it’s funny I think on it so much.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      1 hour ago

      they don’t like the taste of onions, they like the flavor.

      I don’t think the distinction between “taste” and “flavour” is the right way to frame it. Raw onion on its own can be overwhelming. If you eat a hamburger with raw onion on it, the amount of raw onion per bite will be pretty small, and it will be one taste in a whole bunch of other tastes. Your kids probably wouldn’t like eating pure salt, or pure pepper either. But, food with some salt tastes great.

      Having said that, fried onions are a whole different game. After 5 minutes the onion loses a lot of its potency and gets a bit sweet. After 30 minutes it’s basically a very slightly pungent candy. For a French Onion Soup, you can cook them for up to 2 hours before they’re ready. A pot that’s full to the brim of raw onions reduces down to a thin layer at the bottom, and they taste more like gummy worms than onions at that point.

      Onions raw to fully cooked for a french onion soup.

      I love French Onion Soup, and occasionally make it. I’d make it more, it’s just that slicing up more than a kilogram of onions is a whole process. It’s so difficult it makes me cry every time I do it.

    • DarkSirrush@lemmy.ca
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      3 hours ago

      For me, I dislike (and as a child, hated) the texture of onions. Onion as a flavour has always been fine, it was biting them that was the problem.

      Caramelize the onions a bit and blend half into a paste, ask which one tastes bad. If they answer that only the chunky onion is bad, teach them about texture preferences.

    • BenVimes@lemmy.ca
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      1 hour ago

      It’s a personal thing, but the smell of cumin kills my appetite. I had a bad experience with it once and I can’t shake the association between the smell and the experience.

    • That’s one of the best smells of ever exist. There was a bakery on the way from my home to school. They usually had a fresh batch when I walked to school in the morning, and boy it made me salivate.

  • Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
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    7 hours ago

    There wee several house-party focused cookbooks that suggested to just fry off a pan of decoy onions as your guests enter the house. Doesn’t matter if they get used in a dish or not, just cook the onions.