Here is the method I use most often, which might also be helpful to you. kleinbl00 tried it out here
"Welcome to serious eats. There's exactly one way to do something and it's the way we're telling you. Despite the fact that cooking is contentious and subject to a great deal of interpretation, we're right and you're wrong and anyone who disagrees can fuck off." Ever made one of their recipes? They're completely joyless. If they were car dealers they'd sell Volvos and make you feel bad for considering that you might want a car driven by someone other than a sour-faced bureaucrat.
I've made one or two things from there and been pretty happy, but then again I'm not really one to follow a recipe exactly. I'll admit that their recipes can come off as a bit too authoritative at times and the opinions presented can be strong, but they do post updates on techniques when they find better ways to do stuff.
It's not the recipes, it's the discussion. It's the attitude. It's their whole way of doing things. Take, for example, their take on cornbread. "Why cornbread shouldn't have sugar." Okay, why shouldn't it? Other than the obvious answer (because it's gross)? Well, we go through a long, roundabout explanation for why Southern cornbread sucks but spend zero time on talking about what the rest of the country does and we reveal that back in the '50s white housewives couldn't find anything but masa even though they didn't know it was masa so they fucked with the recipe because the recipe was fucked. Why add sugar? Because the cornmeal sucks: Okay, so if you're using modern stone-ground meal that doesn't suck, it doesn't need to be sweet. And if you're using cornmeal that does suck, you should probably add sugar (if that sweet whang is what you want, I guess). But the article is "the real reason sugar has no place in Cornbread" and then they finish with this: ...pretty militant statement for an article about how fucked up ingredients have been and how cooks have been adapting, no? Compare and contrast with the way allrecipes treats cornbread: every comment has something or other they tweaked and it all worked out just fine. And that's why I hate SeriousEats. I don't care if you're making a scallop souffle - there's no recipe on earth you need to be that dickish about. It'll work most of the time. And attitudes like SeriousEats are the kind of thing that makes people think you have to "mince" garlic rather than crush garlic or else you're making slop. Grinds my gears.High-volume steel millers started using corn harvested unripe and dried with forced air, which had less sweetness and corny flavor than its field-ripened counterpart. "You put sugar in the cornmeal because you are not working with brix corn," Roberts says, using the trade term for sugar content. "There's no reason to add sugar if you have good corn."
And you shouldn't use a grain of wheat flour or sugar. If you start with an old fashioned stone-ground meal like the Anson Mills' Antebellum Coarse White Cornmeal, you'll have no need for such adulterations.
Yeah, dude. a good garlic press is a blessing. A shitty garlic press is a curse. Anything that says "zyliss" is shit. Actually, looking at Amazon the only ones that aren't obviously shit are the Oxos and having seen those in person, they're kinda shitty. I have a Messermeister and it doesn't fuck around. I also have a peeler. And yes - it's easy to mince garlic. It also makes your fingers stink. It also makes you avoid the little tiny cloves, whereas with a press you throw seven or eight of them in at once and go sqwoosh. I was in the "mince not crush" camp until I met the Messermeister. Then I got it.
Shit man, that Garlic press looks like it plays for keeps! I wonder if there's a difference (however slight) in taste depending on mice/crush, sort of like the whole shaken/stirred argument for Gin.
I thought we'd looked into that but I was mistaken. I suspect you "bruise" garlic a lot more by pressing it rather than mincing it, but the state of knives I see in most kitchens you're doing a fair amount of bruising anyway. I will say this: thin-sliced garlic fried is definitely different than mashed garlic fried. Both are better than the stuff in the jar.