Shelf · Knife & prep · No heat
Smashing garlic
Laying the flat of the blade on a clove and hitting it once with the heel of your hand.
Why it works
It splits the skin off in one move, and it ruptures the cells all at once rather than in the tidy slices a knife makes. Whole ruptured cloves give a rounder, sweeter garlic than mincing does — which is why a smashed clove is what you drop into oil and fish out later.
The tell
The skin comes away in one piece and the clove is flattened but still holding together, not in fragments.
How it fails
Hitting it twice. The second blow is what turns it into paste and paste is what burns in the pan. One firm push is enough — and if you actually wanted paste, mincing it with salt is the way that does not spray it across the counter.
In the app, the card opens on the recipe step that names it, with the tell drawn.
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