Ina Garten's Clever Hack For Peeling Large Amounts Of Garlic

Like deseeding pomegranates or destemming kale, peeling cloves of garlic can be one of the most tedious kitchen tasks, especially if you cook with a lot of garlic. Luckily for us, professional chefs like Ina Garten face these same kitchen headaches everyday and have found ways to make their most monotonous tasks a lot speedier. 

The cookbook author and Food Network star is no stranger to cooking with large quantities of garlic. Whether it's her chicken with 40 cloves of garlic or her garlic mashed potatoes, she's had her fair share of practice to find the perfect way to peel garlic. And while prepping her spicy-sweet penne arrabiata recipe on Food Network's YouTube channel, Garten had an opportunity to share her helpful hack for peeling large amounts of garlic — 24 cloves in this case. After separating the cloves of garlic, she turns to her stovetop. "I blanch them in a pot of boiling water just for about 15 seconds," she says. "Then you'll see the skins just slip right off." If your garlic skins are stubborn, try blanching them for closer to a minute, then watch the hot water release the skins from the clove. We wouldn't recommend blanching for any longer, however, as your recipe probably doesn't call for pre-cooked garlic.

Other chefs have slight variations on the speediest way to peel garlic. With more space and time to prep the night before a lunch or dinner service, professional restaurant chefs submerge whole cloves of garlic in room temperature water overnight. In the morning, the cloves are ready to release themselves from their papery home. This is a more passive version of Ina Garten's blanching hack, but if you have the time, the overnight process will save you a step, and a dish to wash, the next day.

Both the overnight hack and Garten's stovetop method for peeling garlic are perfect when working with a large volume of the veggie. However, if you only need a couple of cloves, working a day in advance or heating up a pot of water probably isn't time efficient. A quicker option is to separate your cloves from the bulb, then microwave the few cloves you need in a little bit of water for 30 seconds. This technique is a great replication of Garten's method for a clove or two. However, if you need an entire head, go ahead and boil that water.

Last but not least, super fresh garlic is much harder to peel than older garlic. In fact, you can tell how old your garlic is by how easy it is to remove its skins. So, if you're peeling garlic by hand and find that it's a painstakingly tedious process, see if you have an older head of garlic on hand or look for more aged-looking garlic in the produce section (just avoid any that gives when you squeeze it).