Mince Garlic for Vegetable Beef Soup

Video Transcript

" Hi! Helen McMahon, here for Expert Village. The next item that we are going to put into our beef vegetable soup is garlic and there are several different ways that you can handle garlic to get it ready to go into your soup. First of all we want to cut off the outer skin. Sometimes this gets to be a bit of a problem. This one came off quite easily and I am going to demonstrate a couple of different ways that you can deal with garlic. In this case, I am just going to cut it, slice it up with this Chef’s knife. This is a very sharp Global brand knife from Japan and it gives a very nice even mincing action. You don’t want anybody at your dining room table to get a big mouthful of garlic, if they are not expecting it. So this way it gets to be broken up into uniform bits and just sort of push it down if it rides up on the edge of the knife. This is also very good for doing garlic bread. You spread it on French bread or Baguette with some butter and it gives you lovely garlic bread after it’s been in the oven for a few minutes. Another way to do garlic is take a clove and the big problem with garlic seems to be getting the skin off. Here is one method; you can insert the garlic with the skin on into a little tube like this; say that you can buy in a kitchen accessory store, put it in and just give it a little roll back and forth and that skin comes right off; no problem whatsoever. This time I am going to use a garlic press so you have an idea of how that works. You just insert the cube, you might have to cut it a bit to make sure that it fits in there a little more easily and then press; this is a little bit too big. This is a very large cube bundle of garlic and you can press that down and you see how the juice comes out, lovely juice. This is actually a wonderful way to make garlic bread because then you don’t have big chunks. Sometimes people find a bit of garlic too much on their bread but either way you use it, you want to be sure to put that into your soup because it gives it nice flavor with the beef. "