Cooking Garlic? Crush It First

Got a recipe that involves cooking garlic? You might want
to crush the garlic first.

That may be the best way to preserve the herb's healthy compounds during
cooking, a new study shows.

Garlic contains compounds shown to help prevent blood clots. But most garlic
studies have tested raw garlic, and cooking can damage those anticlotting
compounds.

Crushing garlic may help prevent that damage, report the researchers, who
include Claudio Galmarini, PhD, of the agricultural sciences faculty at
Argentina's Universidad Nacional de Cuyo.

Galmarini's team found that garlic cooked three minutes in boiling water or
in an oven at about 400 degrees Fahrenheit has the same amount of the
anticlotting compounds as raw garlic.

But cooking uncrushed garlic for six minutes "completely suppressed"
those compounds' anticlotting effects, the researchers write.

Galmarini's team then tried crushing the garlic by putting it through a
garlic press before cooking.

That helped preserve the compounds, although they still lost much of their
anticlotting effects after three to six minutes.

The study appears in the Journal of Agricultural and Food
Chemistry.

By Miranda Hitti
Reviewed by Louise Chang
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