Over the past decade, the ingredients in my refrigerator have changed a lot. Once full of animal protein to make traditional Peruvian dishes like lomo saltado,ceviche, escabeche de pescado, aji de gallina, and seco de cordero, it’s now replete with plant-based ingredients that I use to veganize the food I grew up with. But there’s been one constant throughout this change: a jar of garlic puréed in olive oil.
I remember my mom reaching in her refrigerator for a jar of homemade garlic paste instead of mincing fresh garlic to cook the steamed rice that accompanies just about every savory Peruvian dish. She’d scoop and lightly brown a teaspoon of garlic paste in a pot with canola oil, then add rice plus salt and gently toss the rice to coat it with garlic before pouring in water. That unmistakable mix of pungent and sweet aroma from the sizzling, dissolving garlicmeant dinner was coming soon.
So, until recently, I thought that cooking with garlic paste was a Peruvian thing. After all, my mom swears by it, and several Peruvian cookbooks in my library have recipes that use garlic paste. It’s in the marinade (along with hot peppers and vinegar) for a stove top pachamanca, and in the seafood dressing for mashed potato causa. It’s also in a multipurpose onion sauté that’s stirred into fresh corn dough for tamales, or mashed with rice and beans into a tacu tacu fritter, or serves as the base for a quinoa chowder.
In contrast, most American recipes I’ve seen call for mincing or mashing garlic. But recently I noticed a ginger garlic purée (GGP) recipe inMy America,Kwame Onwuachi’s cookbookthat celebrates the food of his African, Caribbean, and Southern roots.
“The combination of the wake-up-your-mouth zing of ginger and the slightly softer garlic is common throughout the Caribbean,” writes Onwuachi in the recipe’s headnote. Onwuachi encountered GGP during a pop-up dinner in Mumbai, India, and believes that cooking with GGP is sometimes better than using minced garlic: “It covers more surface area, especially when marinating. It also spreads evenly throughout rice dishes,” he tells me. A larger surface area means it cooks faster, and it’s ideal for thickening stews and sauces.
There’s a whole half cup of GGP in a marinade for braised oxtail in Onwuachi’s book, two thirds cup GGP is reduced with sugar and ketchup to glaze over fried fish, and two teaspoons GGP are in the onion sauté for the charred eggplant stew that is baigan choka.
Despite the popularity of GGP in Indian cuisine,Nik Sharma, food science expert and author of the 2020 cookbookThe Flavor Equation, believes that puréeing ginger and garlic is relatively new. “When I grew up in India, it was more of a convenience thing that people would blend ginger and garlic together,” he explains.
Garlic is a popular booster of savory flavors in many cultures, and cooking with homemade garlic paste, or ginger garlic paste, is certainly more convenient than having to peel and mince garlic cloves. An exception, perhaps, is when you want a strong textural or visual element for the garlic, such as when slicing and frying garlic slivers for a salad. But what about the flavor? How is puréed garlic different from minced garlic?
Sharma explains how processing garlic creates its intense aroma, “The more you chop garlic, the more the tissue breaks down, which means a larger number of cells keep breaking down and release an enzyme which produces flavor molecules.” But there is a drawback, adds Sharma, “The con to that is that because you're breaking it down so much, the surface area increases, which means that a lot of those flavor molecules are very volatile.” This means that, unless you use (or jar) the garlic paste quickly, flavor molecules will float away instead of making it into the food you are cooking.
It also turns out that the tools we use to prep garlic make a difference. “If you take garlic and mash it up in a marble mortar and pestle, you’ll have less garlic flavor." Perhaps you're not breaking as many cells open, but also, "because marble is alkaline in nature, it's basically highly pressurized calcium carbonate,” says Sharma. That neutralization of flavor occurs whenever an acid (garlic) is combined with a base (calcium).
The ultimate intensity of the flavor and aroma garlic paste adds to a dish depends on your next steps, too. Add it raw to a sauce and it will pack some serious bite. But sauté it in cooking oil to make rice or stir it to an aderezo base of sautéed chopped onion and tomato for a stew and it’ll become milder and sweeter.
To make garlic paste, my mom would simply put peeled garlic cloves in a small container, pour in enough olive oil to just cover the cloves, then purée it all in a blender. Onwuachi purées ginger and garlic with grapeseed oil, while Sharma told me he prefers to grate raw garlic cloves with a Microplane. Homemade garlic and oil purée will keep refrigerated in a sealed container for a week, or frozen for up to six months.
Despite the science, the convenience, or pros and cons of puréeing garlic in oil, there’s another reason why I do it—nostalgia. Sautéing garlic in oil to cook rice is the first thing I learned from my mom, in her kitchen, some four decades ago. That lesson launched me on a culinary trajectory that I could not have predicted and that continues to evolve. And along for that ride, in the side door of my refrigerator, is a jar of homemade garlic paste.
