How to Chop Garlic

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis, on behalf of Expert Village. Today, I'm going to take a few minutes to show you how to make a really tasty New England Clam Chowder. We've got our garlic here. I'm going to show you a really fast way to peel garlic. You take your whole garlic bulb. Actually, this is a single one. You just take it, and place it under the butt of your knife; right there; under the blade. Take your hand and put it on top; right here. Be mindful of the fact that there's a sharp blade there. Put your hand on top; put your other hand on top of that one, give it a nice push, and lo and behold; your garlic just falls right out of the wrapper; It's excellent. You can do it with multiple pieces at a time; although, I tend to have better results just doing it with single pieces, and it's a good way to break up any nested pieces. That's a really resilient piece of garlic; by the way. It's very tough, so we'll just peel that out. There's a bit of a funky piece there. We don't want that piece, so we'll just toss it. The same rule applies for the smaller pieces. You can even use the tip of your knife if they're too small. Those pieces are too small to use. The most important thing to remember is the fact that the knife is sharp, and the last thing you want to do is slice your palm open. I'm no expert on these things, but I'm pretty sure it would hurt. Actually, I am an expert on it; I've been doing this for a long time; who am I kidding? So there you go; there's you're peeled garlic. I'm going to grab a towel and get the stickiness off my fingers. All right, we're going to lop off the tail end here; the root end. That part is not so tasty; a bit crunchy, kind of woody. It doesn't taste very good. It doesn't cook, so I cut that off. I'm going to go with a pretty sizable chop on this, just because I like my garlic nice and big so we can identify that it's garlic. What I'm going to do is set it right here, if I can keep it from wobbling around. Just do a single pass here; get nice big pieces. I say single pass, and then I have a piece stick to the blade. Something along the lines of that; right there. As this sweats down, and as you work it through the soup, it will break down even more. So, don't worry about that. Like I said, I like big chunks of garlic in my soup. All right, I guess now we get to actually move on to work...actually, we've got to cut the bacon first; then we get to work on our actual soup. "