The Mongolian Garlic Crusher

I promised a long time ago that I would write about the Mongolian Garlic Crusher and have decided to do it now, since my salt posting is taking some time - there's just too much to write about salt and I want to give you as much salty juice as possible on my favorite mineral when it's properly done.

So, the Mongolian Garlic Crusher. Just so you know, this is my favorite tool in our apartment, and when I moved from Manhattan to Indianapolis (before landing in Chicago), the one most important thing I took with me was this beautiful rock which gives me so much pleasure in the kitchen.

A little history is important here (and just so you know, if you're here for the 'medicinal benefits', there are some so just bear with me).... I have a lot of love for garlic, much like salt, and I remember getting to know garlic in my life, every step of the way. One of my favorite scenes from a movie is in the fabulous "Goodfellas" with Ray Liotta, where he's in jail with his compadres cooking and they slice garlic with a razor, paper thin. I proceeded to do the paper thin slice method for a long time until I began my journey into crushing garlic.

Growing up in Thailand, I cooked with and ate garlic a lot as it is an integral part of the cuisine there. One of the things that got to me was peeling the skin off the garlic, since I tended to go nuts and use bulbs and bulbs of garlic per meal this was a crucial issue. Someone finally taught me the art of crushing garlic, so that you can easily peel the skin off - wow! Genius. Every step is significant in cooking, no matter how simple and obvious. My garlic obsession evolved into my writing a 90 page dissertation on the "History of Garlic from Antiquity to the Present" and in the process I learned that not only is crushing garlic nice for getting the skin off but it is essential in allowing time for the garlic to release it's enzymatic reactions so that it can transform alliin via the enzyme allinase into allicin and you can harness the most medicinal benefit from it (total time to let it sit post crushing/bruising: 15 mins)! Hallelujah, another great reason to squash my favorite herb.

I went on to live many years crushing garlic with my knife, with the bottoms of bottles (the wine, the olive oil, whatever had a good flat underside), a crok (Thai mortar & pessel) until one day while walking through the Gobi Desert in Mongolia pleasantly hunting rocks, I stumbled across the above pictured Mongolian Garlic Crusher. I lifted this rock up (I was alone in the middle of nowhere, I mean NOWHERE) and thought to myself now this is a garlic crusher - it's perfect! - I can crush garlic happily every day with this thing without having to find a flat bottomed bottle or some lame knife handle! I proceeded to run back to our tents and showed my brother who was with me on the trip at the time, my find. "Look, a Mongolian Garlic Crusher!". He stared at me blankly after looking worried that there was a big Mongolian man about to crush us (aka. the garlic)! I'm not surprised that my bro thought this, albeit briefly, as I had quite the imagination when we travelled through the Gobi Desert, miles and miles of nothing but sand, rocks, and sky with a few camels and people here and there, will do that to you. Needless to say, when I left Mongolia (where it was difficult to find banks with ATM's in Ulaanbaatar that were conveniently open), with barely any cash left, the only things I brought back were: the Mongolian Garlic Crusher, and a few bags of Mongolian Desert salt. In fact, I got stopped in customs along with many other people who were attempting to smuggle what looked like chintzy Buddhas to me. The customs officials pulled out my big beautiful rock, I was petrified they'd take it but I managed to get through with a few odd looks from them and the Buddha smugglers.


Happy in the Gobi desert!


I not only found a garlic crusher but collected different colored rocks to form a large face sculpture!


I have since continued to hunt for garlic crushing rocks for my friends and family, and I did manage to find a decent one on the Welsh coast for my brother. I think it's the best gift to give someone if you can find the right rock, with a nice flat bottom, a good grip, a nice texture and color... It's my most valuable kitchen tool hands down besides a slinky sharp knife.

Garlic the Great

If there is one ingredient that I'll expound upon that everyone has heard something or other about, it's garlic. Garlic is good for you, you have probably heard that statement individually a million times over. Well, it's all true. It is "good" for you! Not only is it good for you but it has a long history the world over, you can find it in virtually every culture and in folklore galore. Garlic keeps vampires away, afterall. Whilst I was studying my undergraduate degree I wrote a dissertation on the History of Garlic from Antiquity to the Present along with exploring it's medicinal values. I'll just say this, 70 pages was not enough! And neither will this blurb on this blog be enough. But I'll make my best attempt to share the best bits with you here.

First, a bit of the juice on the history of garlic. One of my favorites (note: there are HUNDREDS of stories if not thousands like this), during the 11th century when Denmark was involved in a war with England it was said that the warriors wounded in the stomach were sent to a "witch-doctoress" who fed garlic to the soldiers and then proceeded to smell them to tell which ones had perforated intestines and would die. This was the process of elimination so that she could concentrate on the ones who might survive. While this story is not particularly enticing in terms of garlic's medicinal value, it is certainly telling of it's odiferous capabilities.

Garlic can be traced back as far as 2000 B.C. where it was cultivated in the East and the Chinese used it for medicinal and cooking purposes. The ancient Egyptians held garlic as a deity and even worshipped it. In fact, in Egypt it was so holy at the time that the priests were not allowed to eat it. The slaves who built the pyramids were given cloves of garlic to maintain their strength and health. 6 garlic bulbs were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Garlic was nicknamed the "stinking rose" by the Romans and the Greeks and the athletes and soldiers would also eat it much like the Egyptians, to maintain their health.



(what garlic looks like when it's in full stinking rose stance and before it's snipped off and landed in a market .. )

Ceremonious piles of garlic were placed in offerings. Hippocrates named garlic as part of his materia medica. Garlic didn't arrive in England until 1540 and by then it was considered part of peasant fare (then again so was caviar and lobster!). It was likely that it became as such because of it's lovely odors, so much so that the King of Castile banned anyone who ate it from getting near him! I could go on and on about the smell, which really doesn't bother me, but after moving from Asia to the U.S. and working in a corporate environment where I heard "Oh, I can't eat garlic before that meeting" more than once, I now fully understand the power of it's aroma. Here is a Shakespeare quote for you to masticate on:

'And, most dear actors, eat no onionis or garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath.'
Shakespeare, A Midsummers Night's Dream



Garlic is part of the Allium species and the Alliaceae (also Liliaceae) family, also in this family and species are the onion, chive, and leek. You can eat garlic fried, pickled, raw, steamed, pretty much any which way you want. And now (drum roll...) onto the medicinal value of garlic. It can be used as an antiseptic, an anti-viral, anti-microbial, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, digestive, diuretic, as well as in dilating the blood vessels. That pretty much about covers it, it can be used for everything!! As an antiseptic it can be applied directly to a wound as it was in WW I when England was paying as much as a shilling per pound so that it could be mixed with moss and applied to wounds. The most important thing I learned about how to use it medicinally when ingested for any of the above purposes was to crush the garlic and let it sit for 15 minutes so that the enzymatic reactions can take place and alliin is coverted by allinase into allicin, which is the compound that functions as an anti-microbial, anti-fungal, anti-bacterial and anti-viral. You must let it sit for 15 mins after crushing it with the back of your knife, a blunt object (I use the Mongolian garlic crushing rock pictured earlier), the bottom of a bottle, etc.



TCM regards garlic as an acrid and warm herb that kills parasites, relieves toxicity (in certain cases of diarrhea, dysentary, consumption, and coughing), as well as being good for preventing seafood poisoning. Garlic shouldn't be used in cases where someone is too weak and is also demonstrating signs of heat, such as a rash, redness, (red) swelling, and some acne. If you want to ask any more questions about it, feel free to post a comment.

As I said, I could pretty much dedicate this blog to garlic, but I'm just here to introduce it a little more so you can play with it if you so wish and in the near future I'll blow this out into a three part series for those that do want to get a little more up close and personal with the stinking rose. Stay tuned for the History of Garlic, The Medicinal Value of Garlic, and Medicinal Recipes for Garlic....

There is a whole entire town in California dedicated to garlic, Gilroy. The Gilroy Garlic Festivial is one of the best food festivals I have been to and you will find people who love and nurture this lovely derivative of the Allium species in ice cream, pizza, raw, pickled, fried, on tshirts, it's everywhere! If you are in California this summer between July 24-26, you might want to check it out:
http://gilroygarlicfestival.com/

In the meantime, crush some garlic and save yourself!