What to do when you are out of fresh garlic.

First, don’t let that happen. But, if it does, here are some ideas.

This page has affiliate links. If you purchase through those links, I earn a commission at no cost to you.

Why replace garlic?

Garlic in marinara or on bruschetta is delicious. But, if you can’t eat it, don’t want it, or can’t find it, some solution is needed.

Imagine getting ready to make marinara only to find you used all the fresh garlic. Yikes! What do you do?  

You have a few options to use to replace that garlic. One key point in substituting for garlic is we will not find that exact flavor. Your pantry may already have what you need to replace garlic, but in a different form than fresh cloves.

You can replace fresh garlic with powdered garlic, granulated garlic, even frozen garlic paste. Each can work as stand-ins to replace fresh garlic. Garlic chives have a particularly garlicky aroma and fresh garlic flavor without the harsh bite. Garlic chives are flat, almost like blades of grass but smell like garlic. Regular chives are a good flavor substitution but are not a garlic flavor replacement.  Savory Spice is one of my favorite online spice companies and has this garlic page.

Use dehydrated garlic

Dehydrated garlic powder, granules, and even garlic chips are easy to hydrate. If your recipe asks for a clove of garlic, that is generally accepted to be one teaspoon. Spoon half a teaspoon of garlic powder or granules into a small kitchen cup and add half a teaspoon of water. Stir the mix and let it rest until the water is absorbed. The mixture should be a slightly thick paste.

When rehydrating dry garlic, or any dried food, the larger the piece, the longer the rehydration time. Garlic chips will take longer, and maybe more water, than garlic powder.

The goal is to rehydrate the garlic so when the mixture is added to the hot pan, the powder doesn’t burn.  

The water will make steam, which will allow the garlic aroma to develop and flavor the dish.

Garlic salt is intended to be used after cooking or in cold, ready-to-eat dishes. It will rehydrate the same as garlic powder, but the salt will dissolve. Using rehydrated garlic salt adds an unknown amount of salt to your dish.  

What to do when you can’t have garlic?

Can’t have it or don’t want it excludes replacing it. So, we go the building flavor route.

Frankly, one simply does not substitute garlic. We know that garlic adds a depth of flavor to the dish. Garlic adds an earthiness. Some call that umami which also occurs in mushrooms. I made this podcast about umami.

Sweet isn’t the first flavor most people will identify in garlic. Sulphury–that strong pungency–is what most people think of. That sweetness is in there, behind the harsh, assertive notes. But, garlic is first a bit abrasive.  

Why we use garlic and the flavors it offers provides us some direction in how to replace it. Garlic can offer texture in addition to flavor. Just-cooked garlic can be a bit crunchy and toothsome with a strong sulfur garlic taste. Garlic that is blanched, or made into a confit, or roasting brings out the umami notes and makes a smooth, spreadable, clove with a silky texture.  

Fresh ginger is a substitute for garlic

For the zippy, almost spicy hot flavor from garlic, we can use fresh horseradish or fresh ginger root. Prepared horseradish, as you find in the produce cooler, can work but it comes with the addition of vinegar. The fresh root is preferred, but in either case, add the horseradish at the end of the dish, just seconds before you serve. Heat destroys the pungency compounds. Freshly grated ginger also offers quite a zip and some amount of heat. As with the horseradish, to keep that pungent aroma, add freshly grated ginger at the end of cooking.

Ginger does offer another opportunity for flavor. Cut a portion of the root in half end to end. Put the cut side on the cutting board and cut thin slices, making half-moon-looking shapes. I don’t peel my ginger, but I do wash it first. The thin slices will hold their shape in cooking, for a nice aesthetic. They also lose that hot bite and offer a more subtle ginger flavor. I like it mixed with tomato-based sauces on pretty much anything, from pasta to chicken or fish. For the full ginger effect, use both cooked and raw.

The Taste Test: How it started

To find a good flavor substitute for garlic, I tested celery, parsnip, fennel, celery root, ginger, and prepared horseradish. Fresh horseradish was not an option at my store.  Some of these ideas were popular substitutes on various searches but no site explained how they were good substitutes.


Each test used half a teaspoon of extra virgin olive oil, a tablespoon of minced aromatic, and then some orzo pasta. The procedure was to let the aromatic brown lightly to develop the flavor, add the cold orzo and a few drops of water. Each test was seasoned with salt. In some tests, additional sizes were cut. All tests started with the minced portion, except ginger, and I saw no need to pursue those various cuts for flavor.

How it went

1. Celery: I see no way to make this substitute for garlic. Celery is an excellent aromatic when combined with others, onions, and carrots, but alone, in this test, the celery flavor was there, but not a deep, rich flavor.  Frankly, anyone who posts this is a good replacement for garlic doesn’t cook.

 

2. Parsnip: I wanted this to work. The parsnip did offer its earthy sweetness, a kind of old European aroma. I did find a mild depth of flavor.

 

 

3. Fennel: Very subtle. Almost not even there. 

 

 

 

4. Celery root: This had a noticeable upfront flavor that stayed through the bite. For flavor that builds a foundation, celery root can work.

 

 

5. Ginger: Cooked sliced half-moons had the expected ginger flavor. For this test, I added a teaspoon of marinara sauce. Ginger and tomatoes are a flavor I find appealing. This had the level of flavor a garlic pasta would have.

 

6. Ginger: Raw. I added an eighth of a teaspoon of ginger paste at the very end of this test and used marinara as with the cooked ginger. Even that little amount was very present. This would also be a good garlic substitute.

7. Prepared horseradish: I used tomato sauce in this test and added it just before tasting. Honestly, there is no way to taste horseradish and tomato and not think of cocktail sauce. This was not a win. However, what might work is a cream sauce with horseradish and smoked salmon sauce.

Review and more suggestions

Cooking these test aromatics slowly to develop a light brown color is one method for building flavor. The light brown, or darker brown, if you let it cook that long, is caramelization. 

Caramelization is the way to flavor town. Low-ish heat and thin slices of our replacement aromatics will bring a deep and rich flavor to your dishes. The produce section is filled with other alternatives, too. Bell peppers offer a variety of flavors depending on which of the red, yellow, or green you use. Roasted red and yellow bell peppers offer a nice texture and are flavorful substitutes. Various mushrooms and even eggplant can be useful alternatives to create a rich, garlic-free dish.

Garlic replacements may already be on hand if you need them. A little rehydrating and they are almost as good as fresh garlic.

Garlic substitutes are another matter. Setting expectations right will avoid disappointment. Through slow caramelization and flavor development, you can build memorable dishes.

 

Buy your spices and herbs from my affiliate Savory Spice. I love their mixes such as the Mt Hood Toasted Onion Rub but I press it into service for the French Onion Chip Dip.

Grow your cooking skills with a copy of my cookbook, Cooking For Comfort: One-Pot Meals You Can Make available on Amazon




Don’t Assault the Salt

All salt is sea salt—Alton Brown

The trick of that blue box

That blue box, can shaped actually, is my first memory of salt. You know the one: the girl with the umbrella. It always poured so nicely from that can. I used the empty cans to make ducks with construction paper.

As a culinary student then cook then chef/instructor, I gave little attention to salt. The iodized salt tasted bad, but after that, eh, salt was salt and it made the food taste better.

My initial intent with this piece was to show that salts are, mostly, the same ingredient with some pretty colors and very different prices.

I watched a vidcast with Dr James DiNicolantonio, author of The Salt Fix.  I learned that my initial idea was about as wrong as can be.  Those free-flowing salts are to be avoided and those salts in pretty colors are the good stuff.

A brief brief on salt

First, what is a salt?  A salt is a neutrally charged combination of two electrically opposite elements with one being a metal. In table salt, Sodium Chloride, sodium is the metal (I know, right?), and chloride is not. Sodium, Na, is positively charged and the chloride, Cl, is negatively charged. They share at least one electron in their form NaCl and as a whole are stable and not lethal.

Sodium, the metal, is not found as is in nature. It is bonded to another element. In this case, Cl. As sodium chloride, salt has existed in rocks some 3.5 million years ago. As rains and volcanic activity washed and disrupted the planet and the rocks, NaCl was washed into bodies of water which became our seas. Some of those seas evaporated leaving behind the salt. Some are inland lakes. Utah’s Great Salt Lake is one.

For more information– and more there be– about the origins of the seas, salt and Earth, I found this article and this one for starters.

Be we from the sea?

The origins story is interesting and well outside the scope of this piece. Curiously, however, is the sea and of the human body bears a strong similarity to sodium content as well as many of the minerals both bodies need. Sodium may be the most critical for sustaining human life. It facilitates the functioning of the muscles and nerves, controls the water in the cells and gives us blood pressure. Without blood pressure, well, we would be dead.  Why, then, prescribe low salt diets?

How did this happen?

The study of salt in nutrition has focused almost exclusively on the sodium, overlooking the chloride.  In table salt that’s pretty much all there is except maybe iodide-a synthetic form of iodine-or an aluminum product to keep the salt free flowing.  Also, that white color has been created either by bleaching the salt or heating it to extreme temperatures and, sadly, eliminating the good chemicals.

What has been overlooked, until recently, was those important chemicals-minerals-removed from salt and which are vital to the health of the human body.

I spoke with Kyle Mamounis, PhD, the biochemist from Episode 14 of the Culinary Libertarian podcast, about salt research and he referenced this dietary sodium intake paper, quoting “There really isn’t a population wide correlation (let alone causation) with sodium intake and mortality or hypertension etc. There are some people that seem to respond to increased salt with hypertension, and more generally there is an acute effect where salt boosts blood pressure, but it isn’t chronic.

Also, countries with much higher salt intake like Japan don’t have a huge problem with hypertension. And some people will have negative effects, sometimes even increased blood pressure. Potassium is also a wild card, it has been suggested as a counter balance but doesn’t work the same in everyone. There was a fad that didn’t quite get off the ground of using potassium salt rather than sodium salt on food.”

I remember my grandmother having a small shaker can of No-Salt on her table.

The Central Planner Problem

Kyle makes an important point.  The idea that a single thing can be seen, measured, and controlled in a system as complex as the human body is doomed to fail.  A one-size-fits-all approach on the very variable human body is either idiocy or arrogance. Kyle sees the problem this way, “It’s even worse than that.  These biologists seem to forget biology when they consider their recommendations.  They will look at sugar, which obviously raises blood sugar, or salt, which tends to raise blood pressure as the blood has more solutes in it, and forget one of the central tenets of biology which is negative feedback and compensatory mechanisms.  Like economists trying to increase revenue by raising the tax rate, they actually think somehow they will get a linear response in a symptomatic variable from a linear change in one of these nutrients. It’s completely insane.  [It’s] almost nutritional Keynesianism.”

How did salt become so vilified?

Salt and its effect on the human body has been a contested issue for a long time. Reports published in 1904 had refutations published just a few years later and it has been back and forth since. Lewis Dahl, a researcher, claimed to find a link between rats and sodium. [1]

Dr James DiNicolantonio, author of The Salt Fix, finds Dahl’s study less than credible. DiNicolantonio points out that genetically engineered rats were used to draw conclusions about humans, and that skewed the results. [2]

The Scientific American published an article “It’s Time to End the War on Salt,” stating, the “U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs released a report recommending that Americans cut their salt intake by 50 to 85 percent, based largely on Dahl’s work.”[3] That report was published in 1977.  The ideas have taken hold and the work against that continues, but is slow going.

Scientific American points out, as did Kyle, that the complexities of the human body and, specifically the kidneys, are far too complicated to be subject to blanket statements.  “Part of the problem is that individuals vary in how they respond to salt.  ‘It’s tough to nail these associations,’ admits Lawrence Appel, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University . . .”

The hypertension issue

Dr. David A McCarron, quoted in Mark Bitterman’s Salted, comments “‘Sodium is but one factor in the complex interplay of multiple, inextricably related regulatory systems of which hypertension is the end result. A rise in blood pressure means you need to add minerals to your diet, not cut back on salt.  Tragically, the idea that salt is bad for your blood pressure is one of the most generally accepted notions out there.’”[4]

Minerals for the health of it

Mineral deficiency is becoming recognized as a real issue to our health. Iodine, Magnesium, Phosphorus, Potassium, Calcium, Copper, Iron and more are vital micro-nutrients easily obtained, in part, from salt. Just not the commercially available stuff.

Iodine

Dr. Brownstein, of Dr. Brownstein’s Holistic Medicine, suggests that iodine deficiency can have serious adverse affects on the thyroid, which manages many of our functions including temperature and “foggy brain”.[5]

That blue can from my childhood, in Detroit, was iodized salt.  Turns out not iodine but an ion, iodide, usually bonded to potassium or sodium.  Iodide is, according to Dr Brownstein, an inefficient way to get iodine into the body.

Iodine is a necessary element for health, including the thyroid.  “The thyroid is part of the endocrine system, which is made up of glands that produce, store, and release hormones into the bloodstream so the hormones can reach the body’s cells.  The thyroid gland uses iodine from the foods you eat to make two main hormones Triiodothyronine (T3) [and] Thyroxine (T4).”[6]

It’s elemental

I mentioned my certainty that this piece was a puff piece.  The presence of micro-nutrients in salt was the push into the rabbit hole.  I simply had no idea this was part of salt.

I didn’t know that is because salt simply isn’t discussed.  If salt is discussed, it is to eat less.  We’ve seen that that isn’t really good advice.

Mineral salts–a phrase to distinguish between table salt–can contain up to 80 elements and micro-nutrients, including magnesium, potassium, calcium, copper, iron, zinc, iodine, phosphorus and more.  If we don’t obtain these important elements from our salt we are left either taking supplements or not getting them at all, causing deficiencies and problems.

Assault the salt

The blue box or other commercial salt needs to be replaced.  Use it up and buy better.

I’ve checked my local grocery store and in the bulk bins is sea salt as white as the rest of the commercial salts, so I really don’t trust that.  The store does carry packaged pink Himalayan salt.  Nothing else, but it is better than the bleached salt.  Dr. DiNicolantonio is particularly fond of Redmond Real Salt, mined from a dried sea in Utah.

Eating a strict regimented diet for physical health might achieve the goal of weight loss or muscle density, but I say it comes at a price.

I very much like to savor what I’m eating.  Eating well, and enjoying it,contributes to an emotional health quotient which I think is overlooked. And, I think that is also costly.  The cost is not measured in heart attacks, but in dread. Suffering through a meal because “it’s good for me” seems hardly good for me.

A balance between physical and emotional health about food is important and can be easily attended to by changing salts.  Mark Bitterman started his journey collecting salts from the places he visited and each had a specific flavor and contribution.

How much is too much?

Dr DiNicolantonio opines that your body will communicate to you when it is enough. Need more, you’ll be signaled to eat more.  Too much and you’ll be signaled to drink water.

Reason is important too. Our bodies need micro-nutrients but not on every bite at every meal.

How little it too little?

Deficiency, both of sodium in low-salt diets, and micro nutrients as a group, is one of the important issues Dr DiNicolantonio makes.  Deficiency occurs, partly from eating the commercial salt which doesn’t contain any of those important micro-nutrients, but also from elimination either from urine or sweat.  The effects of deficiency are vast and impressive.  Alarming, but impressive.

Sodium deficiency can rob the bones of calcium.  Iodine deficiency, apart from the thyroid, also impact metabolism and our bodies also store fat with too little salt, which is a double edged sword.  Insulin resistance from low salt means we cannot access that stored fat for energy.  We feel fatigue and the energy transfer in ATP needs magnesium.  Basically, the body is less efficient in its functions on a low salt diet.  Inefficiency is overworking and that’s not good.

If you have known health issues, of course, talk to your doctor. Ask questions about the suggestions and what happens if you are advised to alter your eating. What is the unseen consequence of that plan?

Where to get a-salt-ed

Sea salt makers, made the old fashioned way, are a good source of mineral salt.  In California, Pacific Flake makes salt by the evaporation method.  In Oregon, Mark Bitterman’s company sells salt.  Redmond Real Salt, recommended by Dr DiNicolantonio, is a good source of minerals.  Check your grocery store or health food store or shop Amazon.

Here’s a podcast episode I did on salt which includes some of Dr. James’ info, and a bit of a review of, his book, The Salt Fix.

Sources cited

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2118645/

[2] https://ketogenic.com/84-dr-james-dinicolantonio-the-salt-fix/

[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-the-war-on-salt/

[4] Bitterman, Mark, (2010). Salted. Singapore: Ten Speed Press. 46

[5] https://www.drbrownstein.com/dr-bs-blog/

[6] https://www.endocrineweb.com/conditions/thyroid-nodules/thyroid-gland-controls-bodys-metabolism-how-it-works-symptoms-hyperthyroi

---

Let me know what you thought of this article.  Do you have a favorite mineral salt?

[contact-form-7 id=”43″ title=”Contact form 1″]