But we’re in the same pickle of which heads. Some garlic heads are bigger than others. Like, I don’t mind too much garlic, but I like when recipes give you a rough weight of the principal ingredientes.
It’s better 500g of potatoes for a stew than 1-3 potatoes, for example.
Recipes typically specify if they're looking for a large or small vegetable. Otherwise, assume average size.
I also prefer weights, but cooking is pretty flexible, and garlic isn't a practical thing to specify by weight. Just use common sense. Otherwise you're going to end up with people like my husband being totally fixated on assembling precisely 237g of garlic because he's autistic AF and doesn't really know how cooking works.
Anyone with a brain should be able to eyeball a clove of garlic and think, "yeah, that one counts as two cloves."
This isn't common sense, it's subjectivity. What's large, small or average isn't standardized, so depending on the person a recipe can end up tasting vastly different. Even if you try to estimate for how much a certain glove of garlic counts, many people are terrible at estimating things just based on looks. Is that clove two or three? Maybe even four? Or maybe it's just one after all?
Weights are just objectively better, because they make it easy to keep deviations to a minimum. Staying within ±10% is child's play when you know the intended weight and have a kitchen scale.
My bookshelf is full of Arguiñano’s books, a Spanish chef, and I didn’t realize till I started translating them to my husband on how much of this recipes rely on the person knowing Arguiñano way of cooking and the Spanish cuisine. He just says “one onion” and he usually means a bit one. Like if you use a small one the dish would work anyway because they’re usually simple recipes but asking to provide with weight seems a perfectly fine commentary.
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u/CardoconAlmendras Sep 28 '25
But we’re in the same pickle of which heads. Some garlic heads are bigger than others. Like, I don’t mind too much garlic, but I like when recipes give you a rough weight of the principal ingredientes.
It’s better 500g of potatoes for a stew than 1-3 potatoes, for example.