Recipes with garlic

Garlic does not contain its flavour — it manufactures it. A whole clove smells of almost nothing. Cutting it brings together an enzyme and a compound that were kept apart, and the pungency appears within seconds. Hence a rule every recipe below applies without saying so: the finer you crush it, the stronger it is; the more whole you leave it, the sweeter.

Raw and pounded, it becomes a sauce on its own. Catalan patatas al alioli and Cuban yuca con mojo need nothing but garlic, oil and salt worked together; Hungarian lángos is rubbed with a bare clove straight out of the fryer. Warmed gently in oil it switches sides and turns sweet: that is the whole principle of spaghetti aglio, olio e peperoncino and of Portuguese açorda alentejana, where it perfumes a bread broth.

Burnt, though, it turns bitter and nothing saves it. Two precautions: add it to oil that is still warm rather than smoking, and cut it coarser when the cooking will be long — which is why aubergines in garlic sauce and tempeh goreng call for slices, while slata mechouia and bessara want a paste.