Garlic not only tastes fantastic, but it also has a lot of very useful medicinal properties as well. It has been used since Ancient Egyptian times for culinary and therapeutic properties, and is still one of the most widely used foods in the Western world. Perfect for adding intense flavour to pasta dishes, spicing up a chicken dish, roasting in whole cloves with chunky root vegetables or even pickling and eating raw. However you prefer it, I think a huge proportion of the UK population would agree, garlic is an absolute essential in our kitchens. The only teeny weeny issue we have with this wondrous vegetable (is it a vegetable?…. Herb?….Spice?) is having to peel it! Not only is it fiddly and time consuming, you won’t get the smell off your fingers for days. And garlic may smell fabulous when it’s sizzling away with some onions in a pan, but two days on your fingertips, and you won’t enjoy the aroma quite as much.
For a while, people have tried to come up with faster methods of peeling garlic, alongside more effective methods of removing the scent from your hands, but none of them have been quite up to scratch…until now. It may sound crazy, but this peeling garlic in a jar method is super quick, super efficient and saves your fingers from unwanted smells. Before I had seen this particular jar method, I had seen a rather effective method online using two bowls, placed rim to rim with the garlic in the middle, and shaken vigorously to loosen the skins and “peel” the garlic. This method is a good one, and a great way of ensuring none of that sticky, stubborn skin is caught up under your finger nails. However, it is quite tiring, and can be tricky to hold the bowls together and not fling the garlic cloves all over your kitchen.
The method shown in the video below, from DaveHax on YouTube, uses similar concepts to the bowl method but is easier to do, and will not cause any mess at all. You can choose whether to use a full garlic head or to separate the cloves first and just peel the amount you need. If you are using a full garlic head, place the entire bulb in the jar, screw the lid on tight, and shake vigorously. The outer skin will separate from the cloves and you can pause to remove this from the jar to give yourself a bit more space. Continue to shake the jar until the thinner skin separates and you have perfectly peeled cloves. Tip out into a bowl and pick out your freshly peeled cloves, ready for crushing, chopping, pickling or storing in oil for later use.
If you need to shop for some jars to try out this great kitchen hack, check out our storage sections by clicking here.