At one point while working on her second book, That Sounds So Good, “I realized that almost every recipe started with olive oil and six cloves of garlic,” Lalli Music says. Those kinds of recipes have been increasingly fun to explore, says Laperruque: “I think we’re in a wave of garlic not being an accent but a forefront player.”įor cookbook author and video host Carla Lalli Music, garlic’s magic number is at least six cloves. If garlic appeared in a “big little recipe,” it was prominent, as in garlic confit (three heads) or garlic broth (two big heads). “It makes everything better, but you don’t need a lot of it.” Limited to just five ingredients in Big Little Recipes, the cookbook she spun from her former Food52 column, Laperruque rarely added ingredients that offered only subtle accents. “Garlic is like the savory equivalent to how I think a lot of people treat vanilla extract in baking,” says recipe developer Emma Laperruque, a cooking editor at Bon Appétit. How does one land on the “right” amount of garlic? Can there even be such a thing? It’s a small enough quantity that someone can feel empowered to skip it entirely, but present enough that someone else can choose to add six more cloves without feeling like they’ll ruin the dish, he explains.
“Two cloves of garlic can help figure out a range if want to add more, but people don’t get mad at the amount you’re using,” says Ben Mims, a cooking columnist at the Los Angeles Times. But if the common sentiment in so many food-obsessed circles is that garlic, even more than salt, belongs in everything and in unlimited quantity, then why do so many recipes still call for such a stingy number of cloves? If a recipe is ostensibly a work of authority, intended to share one “right” way of making something, then how does one land on the “right” amount of garlic? Can there even be such a thing?įor a recipe developer who doesn’t know their audience’s preferences, calling for a scant quantity of garlic can be a way to play it safe. The love of garlic is nearly universal, as essential to the cuisine of Italy as it is to those of China, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Why? Because there is no such thing as too much garlic. More extreme: When the recipe calls for one clove, use at least a head. One clove is not enough for any recipe, unless it’s a recipe for “how to cook one clove of garlic,” in which case you should still use two. As the memes go, the proper way to measure garlic is with your heart.
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