A Step-By-Step Guide to Mincing Garlic

Garlic is healthy, tasty, and versatile — what’s not to like? If your answer is, “preparing it for a dish,” have no fear. Rebecca Goldfarb of the Social Table showed us some simple tricks for mincing garlic for your home-cooked meal.

1. Separate a couple of cloves off the head of garlic and lay them flat.
2. Place a flat side of your knife on top of the cloves, with the knife’s edge facing away from you. Rest one hand on the knife handle to hold the knife in place, but don’t grip the handle all the way around.
3. With the heel of your other hand, push down on the flat knife blade until you hear the crunch of the clove being smashed.
4. Peel the skin off the clove.
5. Cut off the hard bottom part of the clove and discard it.
6. Arrange the clove in a pile if it has broken into pieces, and slice across the pile to create very small pieces.
7. Remove the garlic pieces that have attached to the knife blade and collect all the small pieces into a pile again.
8. Line up your knife sharp-edge down, with the back half of the blade between you and the pile. Holding the knife handle with one hand, place the palm of your other hand atop the knife (along its spine) toward its front.
9. Use your palm-down hand as a pivot point as you chop with the knife forward and backward in a small arc over the pile of garlic. Remove garlic bits from your knife blade, remake your pile, and repeat the chopping process as needed, until the garlic is finely minced.