Tuesday: The Garlic Rock

I love listening to “The Splendid Table” here on our local NPR station (KUNC). Sunday afternoons just wouldn’t be the same without the warm and welcoming voice of Lynn Rossetto Kasper and her guests, especially the callers who phone in with questions and concerns related to cooking. So I had to buy Lynn’s book (written with Sally Swift, BTW, co-creator of “The Splendid Table” and a 20-year veteran of TV and radio),“The Splendid Table’s: How To Eat Supper” when it came out a few years ago. It’s a wonderful read for many reasons, but one of my favorite items in the book is her “garlic rock” snippet. Actually, it’s Sally’s story, printed on page 117. I am swiping this directly from their delightful cookbook/storybook of cooking:

“Years ago, I discovered I really wasn’t comfortable smashing garlic cloves with the side of a chef’s knife.  I worried about that sharp edge. So I found a rock. It fits snugly in the palm of my hand, it’s easy to grasp, and it has a nice flat side that crushes my garlic to smithereens.

I simply throw it in the dishwasher, and I always get a comment from the galley crew about “Where does the rock go?”

I was so excited when I read this! I too, had never been comfortable smashing garlic with a knife because I am a slow-healer, slow-clotter. ( A paper cut on my finger takes weeks to heal.) Because I bought this book in the winter, when the “river” (aka “the channelized irrigation ditch”) behind my house was dry, I ran out into the riverbed to procure a few garlic rocks. It’s not as easy as it sounds. You need something flat yet substantial, that, as Sally says, fits nicely in your palm. Brought a half dozen rocks in, ran them through the dishwasher three times, and then proceeded to give them to friends as really cheap gifts, or keep them for myself.

I love the garlic rock concept. We grow our own garlic and it tends to be smallish. Peeling it is tedious, so just slamming it with a rock and then pulling off the casing is so much better than what I’d done before. I will always be indebted to Sally Swift for her low-tech, lithic solution to an ages-old problem.