Should You Avoid Or Specifically Buy Pre-Peeled Garlic?

After decades of hopes and dreams, we are finally, almost, living like the Jetsons. While the oft-promised flying cars have yet to fill the skies, we've got video calls and robotic housekeeping, and we can more or less conjure dinner with the push of a button — or at least a few clicks through an app. On the decidedly humbler side, we've also got enough pre-cut or otherwise prepped produce to make almost anything semi-homemade. While it might not rival the futuristic cartoon family's Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle, that jukebox-like machine that could make a whole meal in seconds, imagine telling your own corporeal ancestors that, someday, you'd be able to buy garlic that's already been peeled. Whether or not the purchase is worth it is your modern conundrum to solve.

Whether pre-peeled or whole garlic is the better buy is, vexingly, going to vary from case to case. In a vacuum, we are solidly on team fresh is best. It's cheaper, it lasts longer, and, as home cooks typically in possession of both, we find that it usually seems more pungent. But some recipes, time constraints, and special occasions might call for shortcuts. And pre-peeled garlic might be the ideal ingredient to meet those needs.

Let's say you're warding off a band of vampires. Bet you aren't going to care too much about who peeled what and when just then! Bloodless jokes about the undead aside, this logic actually does follow reason. When garlic is more of a utility — used for something like dressing up a frozen pizza or dressing down Dracula — reach for jars of the pre-peeled allium. The same goes if you're burying it in a batch of Sunday gravy, a big soup, or a deceptively flavorful garlic bread that already packs a punch with the powdered stuff. But something like a pesto, with its concentrated notes, would benefit from the DIY approach.

Now, we do sometimes wonder how many minutes a week we spend peeling garlic, particularly when faced with an especially sticky bulb. To accelerate the process, whacking your cloves with the side of a knife is an effective garlic peeling hack. This also theoretically makes the flavor a little stronger by breaking up the allium, so skip this shortcut when you need a milder garlic vibe, in which case you might have pivoted back to the pre-peeled variety anyway!