What Your Garlic Storage Method Says About You, Judged Harshly By Me
There’s a right way and a wrong way.
In its own little wooden bowl, for some reason
This is the most ubiquitous garlic storage method, for some reason. The garlic bowl that everyone has should be no taller than two inches, no wider than five, be made of wood, and match no other bowls in your home or no other bowl in anyone’s house. No one in your home can know where it came from. “I think I got it when George and Cathy moved to Baltimore. They used to travel a lot. I want to say, maybe, Ecuador?” is the furthest your investigation has ever surfaced regarding the bowl’s origins. The little garlic bowl is the Honda Civic, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the The Office of garlic storage: you like it because it’s good and it’s good because it does its job. It does its job so well that it has just become part of the environment and you would only think hard about it if it was gone.
Notable features: Spiritually humanistic carvings on side of bowl, confettied with three previous garlic bulbs worth of garlic skin/husk/cocoon. In lieu of a small wooden bowl, a similarly sized retro Tupperware may also be used.
In the cabinet with the onions
This is acceptable because similar things should go together. Onions and garlic kind of feel like they are friends. This is a lie we tell ourselves just to feel safer, and, honestly, when it comes to size and segmentation you could just as easily make the argument that garlic belongs to the satsuma family. While storing onions and garlic together jibes on a supposed principle, we need to know that we’re indulging in a logical fallacy. So, congratulations, you are just as irrational as everyone else.
Notable features: A whole lot of forgotten, sprouting garlic. Allowed to be near potatoes but not touching. A closet isn’t a great place to store a boy wizard, but totally fine for garlic.
In a mesh column, hanging from a wall or the ceiling
You are either a witch or Eastern European, as this is objectively the creepiest way to store garlic. Do you keep it next to your skin suit? You are single-handedly responsible for buoying the economy of wine stored in those weird wicker koozies that they only have in period pieces, aren’t you? Did you grow up in a Skyrim dungeon?
Notable features: This will either be used for ineffectual folk medicine or never used at all as to not disturb the aesthetic, in which case you are worse than a witch, as you are a genuine fraud. At least real witches died for what they, or what other people claimed, they believed in. So if you don’t believe in magick with a k, get a garlic bowl like the rest of us.
In the fridge
It doesn’t go there. Are you one of those people who puts onions in the crisper drawer, too? If it’s in an unrefrigerated pile at the store, it can be in a room-temperature pile at your home.
Notable Features: What, do you have, like, bugs or something?
In the fruit bowl
It just feels wrong. Keeping garlic in the fruit bowl feels like a mistake an alien would make in a sitcom where they’re attempting to pass for a human. It’s an intangible but clear display that you don’t know where garlic belongs. No, garlic won’t physically suffer from leaning on a pear. But, still, I will die on my ugly, barren hill screaming that garlic can’t touch bananas. Garlic and bananas are like cam girls and the Amish: neither one benefits from knowing the other one exists.
Notable Features: This method is used by anyone who doesn’t have a little wooden garlic bowl or who doesn’t cook with fresh garlic regularly enough to have a space for it. Let’s call the fruit bowl what it is, an underfunded garlic orphanage.
Minced garlic in a jar in your fridge
It’s not as good as fresh garlic, but dear God is it convenient. Pour out a shot of that spicy garlic water for your dead effort. Sometimes you just look at that big-ass jar and it makes you feel like a busy, important person who has more important-er things to do than mince their own garlic. You feel like a restaurateur. Like you run a decent barbecue place co-owned by a retired rock star that serves dishes like “Spam Halen” and “The Number of the Beef” to uncles in wraparound Oakley’s. Okay, maybe that would kind of suck.
Notable Features: Must be a large jar. If it’s a small one, you just spent five dollars on about six tablespoons of inferior, wet garlic.
Pre-minced, in the freezer
The spiritual opposite of buying minced garlic and keeping it in your fridge. You decided to put in planning and effort just to end up with garlic that you have to defrost and that still tastes worse than fresh garlic. Statistically, no one does this. There are two kinds of people: You either don’t mind mincing fresh garlic because you like cooking, or you prefer the convenience of store-bought minced garlic. If you freeze your garlic, congratulations, you’ve managed to ruin cooking in a way that doesn’t even make it more convenient, you non-playable character.
Notable Features: You saw this on Pinterest. Of course you saw it on Pinterest, because no one does it in real life. Just go buy a garlic bowl, try-hard.
