Hacker News Reader

Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

One of the easiest ways to add inulin to your diet is to make heavy use of garlic to your regular meals. Garlic contains one of the highest concentrations of inulin of any common vegetable. It also has a flavor that enhances nearly all savory dishes.

Before cooking anything dice up a lot of garlic ahead of time. Then heat up a little bit of oil in the pan, add in the garlic and let it sauté until it just starts to brown. Then add in whatever you were planning on cooking.

Don't be afraid to add more garlic. More garlic almost always equals more flavor. This is a big reason why Italian cuisine is so consistently delicious. It's not unusual for me to use 15-20 cloves of diced garlic when making dinner for two.

View on HN

> Don't be afraid to add more garlic. More garlic almost always equals more flavor. This is a big reason why Italian cuisine is so consistently delicious. It's not unusual for me to use 15-20 cloves of diced garlic when making dinner for two.

As an Italian with a passion for cooking, I'd like to say that too much of every ingredient is just too much. A plate is a balance of different flavors, and while garlic does enhance the flavour of a dish, I believe that a dish for two with 15-20 cloves of garlic will taste mostly... of garlic! Garlic is not just a neutral enhancer of taste (or otherwise it could be used with everything, while there are some recipes in which garlic is not an ingredient), but it's presence is quite felt.

While garlic does play a big part in Italian cuisine, I think one of the reasons Italian cuisine is so delicious is that, through its simplicity, it manages to balance a few ingredients very well, allowing them all to appear and compensate each other. Adding a ton of garlic upon everything does not play well with this and probably makes every dish taste like garlic.

Korean American here. Garlic is important in many Korean dishes as well, to the point that there are apocryphal stories of soldiers during the Korean War being located by the smell of garlic. (Which I accord as much likelihood as the same happening from the ping of M1 Garand clips. Which is to say, probably a myth.) Korean cuisine has many similarities to Italian cuisine, in that many dishes are a balance of complimentary flavors between relatively few ingredients, with certain ingredients (red chili paste, garlic, scallions, sesame oil) being prevalent in many dishes -- but not all dishes. Korean cuisine is also prone to being presented as a stereotype of its traditional self, due to these factors.

I've noticed a pattern in the United States, where something very strong or particular is deemed good, and people start using it to excess. This has been true of Garlic for several decades now. (I've been guilty of it too.) I think the same phenomenon is behind things like the so-ubiquitous-it's-obligatory highly bitter IPA, and extremely potent hot sauce. It's like people gravitate towards particular highly salient markers, then apply those or buy those to excess. People like something because it produces a good effect when it's well applied in balance, then other people gravitate towards the marker, not the well-balanced effect. The easy recognition of something salient becomes a substitute for taste.

I think there's lessons here for how people evaluate other people, and for how fads in software develop over time as well.

I really like garlic, I'll even chew up a clove raw occasionally. But good god man, 15-20 is wayyy too much, you can't eat that and be allowed in any social scene outside of north jersey.

When I was living in a tent on a beach in Alaska in the 90's (summer) I used to chew cloves of Garlic as an over the counter medicine. I think it worked like this. I would start chewing cloves of garlic, then I would stop. Then I would immediately start feeling better. It would've worked the same way with hitting myself over the head with a hammer, then stopping, but the garlic had fewer potentially severe long term side effects.

I always use 3-4x as much garlic as recipes ask for and add some onion powder. Then I don't need to add any extra salt above the stock cube (4g salt for one evening meal for four people).

That's still quite a lot of salt unless you're eating 1000 Calorie portions.

(Quick rule of thumb - to maintain a 2000mg sodium per day diet when eating 2000 Calories per day, you need to average a 1:1 ratio between mg sodium and Calories.)

I always use 3-4x as much garlic as recipes ask for and add some onion powder

I've read that this tends to cause irritation of the gut, especially the onion powder.

First, preparing 20 cloves of garlic every night sounds pretty arduous. Second, I bought garlic once in the French Riviera, and the cloves were huge...

You can buy pre-peeled garlic in large, refrigerated packs.

They're not very good (though they work well for garlic confit, where you cook the bejezus out of them anyways).

omg... somebody else who knows the secret of garlic confit and Costco. Seriously, it's probably my favorite kitchen secret.

These are usually from PRC, so I avoid them and just use fresh local garlic that you lightly crush with the broadside of a knife and the peel just falls off negating the need for prepeeled.

For inulin there's the research site 'American Gut' also geneticist Tim Spector's book about foods rich in inulin like sun chokes, leeks, onions, etc. Spector and the American reseacher guy have a documentary on YouTube about a Tanzanian hunter gatherer tribe with the world's most diverse gut microbes who basically only eat meat, berries and tube roots they dig up if anybody is interested.

fresh local garlic that you lightly crush with the broadside of a knife and the peel just falls off negating the need for prepeeled.

That's what I do as well but I have never eaten a meal with a double-digit number of cloves of garlic. The most I've ever used in a meal was 6 and that gave me a ton of gas; never again!

Protip: if you don't peel the garlic cloves, you can just put them straight into the garlic press, squeeze out the good stuff, and then when you open the press and remove the peel, 99% of the debris comes out with it. Then you can just briefly rinse the press under hot water, and it's clean and can go back in the drawer.

I picked this up from some cooking show (maybe Heston Blumenthal?) and after adopting it, adding two cloves of garlic to a dish is now a 45-second operation including cleanup.

garlic is very easy to prep, just the method isn't intuitive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y5h1pDHhzs

What about garlic powder?

My instinct tells me that everything that comes prepacked is of lower quality. There are ways to peel off garlic without even touching it, just hit it a couple of times with something and then the peel comes off. Then pass it through a presser if you don't want to slice it and you're done.

In my experience, garlic and cayenne are OK in powder, unlike parsley, the other thing that I often add to food.

Garlic powder is usually very one dimensional compared to fresh garlic. It might not matter much in a braised dish or if you use it to marinade a piece of meat but it would matter if you were to try a potato dish cooked for less than a couple hours.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com