The health benefits of eating garlic are plenty. It has been shown to lower cholesterol and blood pressure, fight infections and colds and help prevent strokes.
Garlic - A Healthy but Pungent Herb
Garlic is widely used in a variety of recipes, from curries to creamy pasta dishes. The intense flavor is deliciously addictive, lending great taste and pungency to a variety of foodstuffs. However, anyone who has chopped up a clove or two of garlic will almost certainly have encountered the problem of the smell of garlic lingering on their hands, long after the meal has been eaten. Believe it or not, there are actually several ways to combat this.
How to Get Rid of the Smell of Garlic
- The single easiest way to rid hands of the smell of garlic is as follows. As soon as the cloves have been chopped, quickly wipe hands around a stainless steel sink, and rinse in water. No stainless steel sink in the kitchen? Try rubbing hands on a stainless steel spoon instead. It's also possible to buy an egg shaped stainless steel 'soap' from cookery supplies shops for this very purpose.
- If no stainless steel is available, rubbing a little salt or bicarbonate of soda into fingers before rinsing also reduces lingering garlic odors.
- Alternatively, try chopping garlic whilst wearing kitchen gloves.
- It is also possible to chop garlic using a rocking knife and chopping board, which reduces the need to touch the clove directly – especially if a second knife is used to scrape escaped chopped garlic pieces off the rocking knife.
- Use a garlic press, most of which do not even require cloves to be peeled of their skins first. Presses are easy to use, but often a pain to wash up, causing the itty bits of clove trapped into the press to eventually come into contact with fingers. So the above tips still remain very useful.
As a general rule, the smaller garlic is chopped, the more potent is the flavor released. This is due to the chemical reaction of garlic hitting air. The finer the clove is chopped, the more surface comes into contact with the air. Finely chopped garlic will therefore provide a very pungent flavour, whereas if whole cloves of garlic are simply roasted in the oven, the flavor will be deliciously nutty and mild.
Further Reading: Interested in healthy living? Check out Get Fit, Stay Healthy, Live Happy
Sources: Extraordinary Uses for Ordinary Things, Readers Digest
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