Hello and thanks for stopping in today. If your like me, you like easy and convenient, as long as it doesn’t mean sacrificing taste. I use garlic alot when I cook. It adds so much flavor to dishes, but I never seem to use the entire head of garlic before it goes bad. Therefore, I end up throwing the rest away. Fresh produce is way too expensive to be throwing it away…. so I decided to do some research.
I recently purchased some prepared minced garlic at the market instead of my usual fresh garlic bulb. Convenient as heck, just squeeze a little into your sauté pan and voila, easy peasy. I was mostly concerned that the flavor would not be fresh or it would lack flavor altogether, but what I actually found was that it tasted very good! The final product did not taste different from when the fresh garlic was used. Prepared garlic keeps much longer than fresh garlic when it is stored in the refrigerator. So no more throwing out soft cloves, right? Well, not so fast…
We all know that garlic is full of antioxidants and that helps to keep our bodies healthy, but what I didn’t know, until recently, is that garlic loses a lot of its antioxidant properties 2 1/2 days after being crushed. That means that by the time that prepared garlic reaches your local store, all those good for you antioxidants are gone!
If you are not worried about getting those antioxidants and all you’re looking for is convenience, well then, go for it. You will not be throwing away those cloves anymore. But if you’re adding garlic for its health benefits, opt for the fresh stuff!
This time the convenience aspect loses its appeal for me due to the health benefits it doesn’t provide. So if it is fresh, it is for me! Tonight I will make Chicken Prata with fresh garlic.
