I think “cloves of garlic” are a horrible unit of measurement, anyway. I recently had some bulbs of garlic that had only 2-3 LARGE cloves, 3-4cm in diameter each. Imagine someone using them straightforward in a recipe…
Yes, they are. But the idea of recipes is to convey a repeatable means of production. If you ask me to give you a recipe because you liked my food, you usually expect it to taste as close as possible to what you experienced. For that, precision is king. Especially with strong spices. So I would not tell you “Add three cloves of garlic”. I would tell you “Add three medium cloves of garlic, about 15g in total”. Now you know what to expect, and if you like and you have the experience, you can scale this up or down.
Basically, this is not about garlic, it is about imprecise units of measurements. “Cups” is one I hate with a vengeance. As in “Take a cup of spinach” without any information on what it actually measures. Fresh leaves? Losely, oder densely packed? Already blanched? Or a cut filled with little pellets of frozen spinach?
I think “cloves of garlic” are a horrible unit of measurement, anyway. I recently had some bulbs of garlic that had only 2-3 LARGE cloves, 3-4cm in diameter each. Imagine someone using them straightforward in a recipe…
I don’t see a problem. Amounts of garlic in recipes are conservatively estimated lower bounds.
Yes, they are. But the idea of recipes is to convey a repeatable means of production. If you ask me to give you a recipe because you liked my food, you usually expect it to taste as close as possible to what you experienced. For that, precision is king. Especially with strong spices. So I would not tell you “Add three cloves of garlic”. I would tell you “Add three medium cloves of garlic, about 15g in total”. Now you know what to expect, and if you like and you have the experience, you can scale this up or down.
Basically, this is not about garlic, it is about imprecise units of measurements. “Cups” is one I hate with a vengeance. As in “Take a cup of spinach” without any information on what it actually measures. Fresh leaves? Losely, oder densely packed? Already blanched? Or a cut filled with little pellets of frozen spinach?
First thing I do when I get the ingredients for a recipe is double the garlic.
Definitely, plus it’s always thrown in far too early.
Garlic burns remarkably quickly
How do you feel about a knob of butter?
In cooking, generous. There, adding more butter than intended usually has no bad consequences. In baking, dangerous.
That’s because baking is chemistry