People from many cultures look at American recipes that call for one clove of garlic and they laugh. One clove? It seems like a waste of a clove. If a recipe requires garlic, then it should be an entire head. However, the folks who write those recipes have their reasons. On one side are the cooks who assume that people will adjust the recipe to their own tastes, or at least they will eventually. On the other side are chefs who don't want to turn off cooks who aren't used to garlic or may be afraid that it will overwhelm the dish. There are other reasons why recipe writers may hold back on the garlic even though they use much more of it themselves, which you can read about at Eater. -via Digg
How do you approach garlic in a new recipe? Do you automatically multiply the amount of garlic, follow the recipe exactly, or just leave it out since one clove won't even be detected?
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Yep.
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In "It's a wonderful life" old man Potter refers to Italian families in town as 'garlic eaters' which I found to be both a curious phrase and insulting. As for recipes calling for only 1 or 2 cloves of garlic... I just find them dumb and to be ignored. Garlic should be generously used in recipes or not at all. For holidays, as a special treat, I will roast whole bulbs of garlic in muffin pans. I slice off the top of the bulb exposing raw garlic in each clove, then I brush them with olive oil and a touch of sea salt, cover them with aluminum foil and roast them at 400 degrees for 1/2 hour. You can easily squeeze the softened garlic out and onto some nicely toasted french bread rounds. yum!
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Article nailed it with the second sentence. Don't think I've ever only used 1 clove in any recipe. And they kind of tip-toed around the old insult "garlic eaters". And about the use of vanilla: follow the recipe if you're using real vanilla, double the amount if you're using imitation vanilla.
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garlic is the bomb, everyone knows that
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