A friend of mine has asked me if I will cook him and his girlfriend an Indian meal for next weekend, but neither of them eat garlic at all. Having always used garlic in curries I'm a little unsure what the results will be like. Is there anything else I can use in place of garlic, or should I just leave it out all together?

After reading the labels of certain food stuffs I have never really noticed it before, but garlic is in a lot of products like ketchup, chutneys, and sauces. One of the people I'm cooking for has an intolerance to garlic and if she eats she gets dermatitis and blisters in random places.

thanks in advance

Asafoetida is widely used by certain Indian religions for whose use garlic and onions are banned. It stinks but mellows on cooking. It is widely available in major supermarkets and asian shops.

If your guests can tolerate Worcester sauce they can tolerate Asafoetida!

Hello Clive

A large number of Indian vegetarians do not eat garlic at all. You can cook both vegetarian and non-vegetarian curries without garlic, they will be fine.

Mamta

P.S. I should have added that if you use Asafoetida only start off with the tip of the teaspoon at the beginning of the recipe - you can always add further pinches later!

Worcestershire sauce has garlic in it. My Mother said she hated garlic (I was 18 y o before I tasted it at a friends house, and have never looked back) but she loved W sauce. ???

I can understand that some people don't like raw garlic, but it wouldn't surprise me if people who say they don't like garlic wouldn't notice it if it's cooked properly with ginger and integrated into an Indian sauce.

Interesting to hear that there are Indian people who don't eat garlic. What a deprivation! If we abandoned garlic, we'd have to abandon most of our Indian, Chinese and Greek dishes.

Most Indian dishes can be cooked without garlic quite well. If you don't eat garlic, you won't miss it's flavor!

I do like garlic and it ends up in most of the things I cook, but as a general rule I don't use as much as some recipes say. When a recipe says to use 3?4 cloves or more I usually tend to just use the one clove. If I am cooking for others then I just use what the recipe specifies.

I have always removed the middle stem from garlic cloves as i have been told that this is the part that causes bad breath and allergies etc. I don't know how true this is, but I have always done it and it's a habit now.

Ok, Mamta: I'll omit the garlic from some Indian dishes, just as an experiment. If you're right that garlic fans like me wouldn't miss its absence, that suggests to me that people who say they don't like garlic wouldn't notice its presence. Perhpas I just love the pungency of cooking with garlic!

To be honest I can tell when I don't put enough garlic in a recipe (due to running out etc)... it definately adds to the dish... I think I use a lot of garlic and when I cook there is a strong smell in the air but its not garlic. The smell is the overall dish, the onions,spices,meats etc... not an overpowering smell of garlic...

The reason I've stressed the later bit above is when we went to a food market there was a big stall cooking French food and as you got about 5 stalls away you got a massive hit of garlic... maybe its this sort of thing that people imagine all garlic dishes are like ?

Steve

Hello Phil

I am not saying that garlic fans like you will not miss it. What I am saying is that if you eat garlic you love it. On the other hand, if you don't eat it, you don't miss it. Also, if you don't eat it, as many Indian vegetarians don't, you find the smell too strong and unpalatable. If I put garlic in food for my Indian vegetarian family members, they hate it. While my sister was here for the last 2 weeks (she came to see the snow), I did not add garlic to any of my vegetarian food. Otherwise, she wouldn?t have been able to enjoy it.

I love garlic in most things by the way!

Mamta

Not that I meditate or practice yoga, but I found this article on Google earlier and I thought I'd post it here as some of you may be interested: Garlic - Toxic And A Brain Synchronisation Destroyer

I'd never that pilots were forbidden to eat garlic before they fly a plane because it hinders their concentration - it's a new one on me!

Sorry, I missed out the > at the end of the html, so here it is again:

Garlic - Toxic And A Brain Synchronisation Destroyer

An interesting article and a new one for me, i had always read about positive aspects about garlic till now. Some people consume garlic in its raw state which obviously smells, but in indian cooking it is fried so it become less pungent. So if Onions, Leek, Garlic are toxic....so what else is left???. If this was the case then all the garlic/onion/leek etc consuming population would be hospitalised or dead by now or be roaming around like Zombies.

Thanks, Mamta, for the explanation. I must say, it came as a surprise to me that there are Indians who don't eat garlic. What this shows is how limited my understanding of Indian cookery is! I ought to do a culinary tour of India: in addition to learning about the food, I'd get to hear a bit of Tamil in the South (I studied Tamil for a year at university: fantastic!).

Phil

i dont like garlic much so leaving it out of recipes is fine and i think the indian recipes taste fine without it. my only issue is that garlic tends to be in everything these days and what about mexican and thai cooking? i don't think thai curries would taste the same or recado pastes would taste the same without the heavy use of garlic. i like mexican and thai food also so this is a problem to me, and one that i cant see a way around.

Well stu, garlic has become very popular only in the last 50 years in India. Many more younger people now enjoy garlic. In my childhood, you would have been hard pressed to find many garlic eaters there, just as there were very few meat eaters. Garlic comes under Tamish (Satvik=food that is good for you, Rajsik= foods that are heavy/rich), as far as i remember, though it does have many health benefits. It can be a problem when you are eating out, but not when you are cooking for yourself. If you don't like it, then you have to cook without it and as far as Indian cooking is concerned that is fine. It is difficult to understand for people who eat/enjoy/love garlic and who think that Indian dishes don't taste the same without it.

The fact is that many people still don't keep garlic in their vegetable basket in India. Most roadside and fast food/popular vegetarian restaurants or Dhabaas do not cook/serve food with garlic, because then they will have to cook two versions, one with and one without garlic.

Mamta

Mamta is this garlic avoidance (for want of a better word) localised to an area of India? Just wondering as I'm sure all the programmes I've seen with people like Keith Floyd and similar all seemed to use garlic (even the one where Gary Rhodes went to India and watched real Indian chefs making the dishes they were famous for)..

Steve

No, garlic avoidence is not localised to any particular area, thought it is more common in some areas/states of India than others. Also, it is more common not to eat garlic in some casts/sections of communities than others.

Modern Indians are more likely to eat garlic than my generation of vegetarians and people older than me. Younger Indians have been more exposed to different cuisines within India and from outside of India.

Famous chefs/cooks are usually more cosmopolitan in their eating habits, even within India.

In the state I come from, within my community, garlic will never be added to dishes in a party/wedding feast, because many vegetarians attending will not touch the food if it has garlic. Most of my vegetarian siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, do not eat garlic, though all eat ginger and onions. It is difficult to explain to a non-Indian, many vegetarians there consider ginger and onion okay, but not garlic. It almost comes under the same category as eating meat! They come under Tamish foods, which are not considered good for you!

Thanks for that,

Wasn't doubting you in anyway, just wondered as its not something that seems to be mentioned much on anything else.. in fact I think the first time I became aware that some foods like garlic were not allowed was on this site !

Steve

This discussion has been a revelation to me: I just imagined that all Indians ate garlic.

I now wonder whether our assumptions about garlic in Greek cuisine might not be equally faulty.

In connection with this, a Scottish/Australian couple who are resident in Greece served humous to their Southern Greek lunch guests, who'd never heard of it, and found it revolting. I'd always thought that all Greeks ate it.

Greek cuisine, like Indian and many other place is spread over a massive area (compared to the UK). Consider how varied the food is from area to area within the UK (Lancashire and Yorkshire have similar dishes but move to Manchester/Liverpool and things change.. move nearer the coast and they change again.. head to Scotland and without playing to stereo types as I've been there and eaten varying things there is a bias towards fried food... So its not surprising that things within Greek or Indian cuisine it can differ depending on where you are from !

I watched a programme where 2 Canadians where sailing around the World and at one point where going to the Greek Islands. I was stunned and surprised to find that some of the Islands (Greek) brew and drank "Raki" which as far as I knew is Turkish (I was used to it being Ouzo in Greece and wrongly assumed this would be the same all over Greece and the Greek Islands)

Moussaka which I'd always thought of as a lamb dish and pretty much what we are used to here in the UK turned out to have much much more to it than that. In the same way I make potato pie but mine isn't like my partners nor is it like my mums, and again different from my brothers etc the same happens with Mousakka (and just about every other dish in the entire Worlds collection !) I don't make potato pie the same way each time either.. similar but due to time, ingredient, who might be eating it etc, I will vary slightly on a theme.

Moussaka isn't just lamb, in fact from the accounts in a book I read from an ex-Airforce pilot who was just travelling around Cyprus (not even all of Greece) He actually had a family moussaka book and when any of them ate at a restaurant, house, caf? or taverna would make notes on it and what they thought. In there they accounted on the meat being Lamb, Mutton,Pork, Goat, Beef, combinations of any of them, he even thought at one point that a particular moussaka might have been donkey (although I'm guessing this wouldn't be normal anywhere but going back into the 50 and 60's when he was writing the diary it might have been a case of needs must).

So back to the point, if your family doesn't like garlic or your beliefs state you can't use it, then you won't have it in your dish...It doesn't mean that next door won't use it... doesn't mean that a 100miles away, 1000miles etc that things won't change due to different beliefs, things that will grow in the local soil, local traditions etc...However you will still make the same sort of things (like potato pie, like moussaka, like curry etc) but one might use garlic, one wont.. one might add lots of tomatoes because they grow in the garden and another might not... you might like lots of chilli, another.... well you get the picture !...

Steve