garlic

Allium sativum, the bulb, appears in five recipes here, always crushed or minced and always cooked briefly. Abo shalhoob stirs in two minced cloves with the spices for about a minute. Harrak osbao adds four crushed cloves with cilantro for 30 seconds, the Japanese curry puts in three minced cloves for the last 30 seconds of the beef sear, and gazan sayadiya cooks four crushed cloves with tomato paste into the onions for 2 to 3 minutes. The molokhiya with chicken is heavy-handed: a whole head, about 10 to 12 cloves, minced and fried in olive oil for 20 seconds as the start of the taqliya. Two recipes say a brief cook softens the bite and keeps garlic's protective edge.

The Journal's note on garlic explains the chemistry. An intact clove keeps alliin in the cytosol and the enzyme alliinase in the vacuole, and only a broken cell lets them meet. At room temperature the conversion to allicin is about 97 per cent complete within 30 seconds, and a ten-gram clove yields at most around five milligrams. Heat attacks the enzyme: in small whole cloves in boiling water it is gone within about two minutes, so in a clove cooked whole most of the alliin never becomes allicin. Crushing before heating and heating before crushing, the note says, are two different recipes. The popular ten-minute rest comes from rodent-tissue work, and allicin forms in half a minute anyway.

The note calls what garlic does once eaten real and modest. A meta-analysis of eleven trials found systolic blood pressure about 4.6 mmHg lower than placebo, and about 8.4 in people with hypertension. A synthesis of 108 trials found better triglycerides, cholesterol fractions and glucose, and no effect on body weight. No trial has shown it prevents a heart attack or stroke. Supplements can raise bleeding risk for people on anticoagulants, and raw garlic on skin causes chemical burns.