Product Test: Dreamfarm Garject, Garlic Press (22 Dec 2011)

http://dreamfarm.com.au/products/garject

Well-built garlic press

Thanks to Liz Goopy from Dreamfarm for sending me a product sample of the Garject ($39.95) which they consider to be the world's best garlic press. It's quite ergonomic to hold and feels solidly built. Definitely much nicer than the cheap one I already have in my possession and after crushing 3 garlic cloves it was also noticeably easier to clean. It did a good job at crushing the garlic cloves quite finely. The ejecting button for the garlic skin seems to work quite well although be sure to turn the handles back on themselves so the bits stuck in the holes get pushed out before ejecting the peel which I forgot to do in my video test below. I actually didn't realise it had a built in scraper as well so I probably didn't need to use my knife to scrap the garlic — force of habit.

SNAPSHOT REVIEW:

PROS: Solidly built, Pretty easy to use, Crushes garlic well, Quite ergonomic, Fairly easy to clean

CONS: Funny name but I guess that's what Dreamfarm is known for, Perhaps not the cheapest garlic press on the market

MUST TRY: Using it again and seeing if the scraper works

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Dreamfarm Garject

Peel garlic — possibly use this 10 second technique

Garlic peel ejector

Freshly crushed garlic

'How To Peel Garlic in Less Than Ten Seconds' by shaking the dickens out of it (5 Oct 2011)

http://www.saveur.com

http://www.youtube.com/user/SaveurMagazine

Crazy simple and yet it works

I can't quite remember how I first came across this video in the last week but possibly as Fig & Cherry mentions in her post it might have been a tweet I saw by Fouad Kassab from The Food Blog [Correction: I now know it was via Geoff Kim, thanks mate]. Tonight I needed to peel some garlic for a pasta dish and thought I'd try this simple yet crazy sounding idea. Thinking to myself it definitely won't work and it was just some funny internet scam to make people look silly I put three old cloves of garlic, slightly pushed and battered, in between two small stainless steel bowls (smaller than what you see in the video) and 'shook the dickens out of it'. To my amazement all three cloves of garlic came out cleanly peeled. I couldn't believe it and I still don't actually know how it all works. I felt like an idiot shaking them up but I love the simplicity of the technique, especially if you had a lot of garlic cloves to peel. I wonder if it works for all types of garlic, I'm assuming so. Now if I could just apply the same simply technique to peel an orange, potato, carrot or even a pineapple that would be pretty darn special as well.

Other handy kitchen techniques discovered:

• 13 Nov 2011 - How to peel a hard-boiled egg in less than ten seconds

• 5 Oct 2011 - How to peel garlic in less than ten seconds

Bad screen shot of Todd with his eyes half-closed — sorry!

Garlic before shaking

Garlic after shaking — jaw drops, OMG! WTF! Bullsh*t! etc etc

The video

How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds from SAVEUR.com on Vimeo.