Hello! I’m Robert Nasser from Dinner Done in Centreville, Virginia. We’ve been talking about basic vegetable prep. Now, we’re going to show you how to peel and cut garlic without making a huge mess. You can always of course buy the garlic that’s already been peeled for you and they’re sitting in the refrigerated case in your grocery store. But I like to keep some garlic on hand because I think it’s a lot fresher than the peeled stuff that you get or heaven forbid the already chopped garlic.

Take your head of garlic and break it up in the individual cloves, don’t take more than you’re going to use. So let’s say you’re going to use four cloves for whatever you need. Lay the cloves individually on your cutting board and taking a relatively wide knife, lay the flat of the knife on to the piece of garlic and gently smash it down. Skin it all.

Now, the garlic will come right out of it shell, no need to spend some time trying to peel it with a knife. I always also cut off the hard end here because I really don’t want it. Now by doing this, you’re actually doing yourself a favor. Garlic will not release all of its pungency and all of its flavor into the food unless you crush it. Crushing it breaks the cells, the internal cells of that make up the garlic and allows all the juice with all the flavor out. If you simply took a whole peeled clove of garlic and chop it up, you wouldn’t get the same amount of flavor than you would by first crushing it. So once you’ve crushed it, you want to give another little crush first or second again, that’s fine. Then proceed to chop it again by resting your knife on your knuckles and keeping your fingertips back so you don’t get cut. Chop it as fine as you want.

Now after you’ve done quite a few cloves, you’re going to end up with a lot of garlic juice on your hands. If you don’t wash this right away, you may end up smelling like garlic for the next couple of days. There are two things you can do about this. First, using warm water and soap, go immediately over to the sink, wash your hands very well or my personal favorite, I take a little bowl with white vinegar, just regular white vinegar in it, lightly soap my fingers and move them around. The vinegar will take care of all the garlic oil and your fingers smell like garlic for the rest of the week. That is how you peel and cut garlic.