For years, we've gotten the skins off garlic by smashing the clove with the flat of our knives, but we recently learned a gentler technique. This one involves "pinching" the skin off using your bare hands...
Hold the garlic clove between your thumb and the knuckles of your first finger with the flatter edge of the clove facing you. Pinch your thumb and first finger together, bending the top and bottom of the garlic clove together.
The skin on the flat surface of the clove will split under the pressure. You can then slip your finger into the split and quickly tug off the skin.
The advantage of this technique (besides feeling like a super hero who can crush rocks bare-handed) is that the garlic clove itself remains unbruised. This is something that's hard to avoid when you're smashing the clove with the flat of your knife. Normally this isn't an issue since we end up mincing the garlic anyway, but there are certain dish presentations where whole, unmarred cloves would be a plus.
Plus, no knife or other potentially wound-inducing kitchen implement needs to be used for this technique. If that has been a source of worry for you, this is a dream come true!
We have to admit that some of the larger cloves or cloves with particularly thick skins give us some trouble with this technique. We also couldn't see peeling more than a few cloves this way and will probably fall back on our old smashing method for a dish that requires a lot of garlic.
Give it a try next time you need a few cloves!
Related: Recipe: DIY Garlic Paste
(Images: Emma Christensen for the Kitchn)
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I too was taught the smashing with a knife method. And my husband if forever trying to get me to use this method, for the above mentioned reason that he's afraid I'm going to hurt myself with a big knife. I can't really say that either is better, although I agree that with the bigger cloves it is more difficult to pinch the skins off. (Admittedly, I have pretty small hands puny hands, heh.)
Wait...if using knives is a worry to you...perhaps you shouldn't be cooking.
Also, I've always peeled garlic without smashing it. I actually hadn't even thought about that until this post. If I smashed the garlic, then peeled, I'd probably worry that some peices of the skin would have broken off into the openings of the smashed garlic.
I have used a paring knife and peeled garlic much like an onion but to be honest, the CHinese supermarket near me sells perfectly peeled garlic cloves so cheaply that I hardly ever bother to buy head garlic anymore.
I peel my garlic something like this, too.
I never understood all the fuss about the 'difficulty' of peeling garlic and the special contraptions tht have been created... this is how I've always done it!
I believe I saw Alton Brown do this once (though it might've been another Food Networ star):
Take your cloves and put them in a stainless steel mixing bowl (with a lid), close it up, and shake a few times. The garlic comes out peeled and you don't get garlic-y hands :)
I kinda like garlicky hands (for a while at least)...fresh garlic smells so amazing to me! :)
I've never had any issue getting the skin off garlic...I usually end up doing something like this. First, though, I cut off the very end of the clove, the pointy-est end, through the skin. The rest of the skin comes off so easily, and if not, I pinch a little.