Jacques Pépin's Easy Method To Separate Even The Most Stubborn Garlic Cloves

Chopping garlic sounds simple, but arguably no other cooking task has spawned as many single-use gadgets. Do a quick Google search and you'll find garlic presses of all shapes and sizes, not to mention peelers, squeezers, crushers, rockers, choppers, and grinders. The sheer volume of devices proves that a lot of people will do anything to make garlic-chopping easier.

It makes sense if you think about it. Garlic is covered in tight, papery skin that takes forever to peel off. Plus, once you've chopped a clove or two, the sticky oil from the garlic gets on your knife blade and fingertips, and little bits of papery skin get stuck to everything, making the whole chore super frustrating.

Despite this, chefs have been using garlic for thousands of years, and they didn't need (or have) any fancy devices to make it easier — and you don't need any, either! All you need in order to separate garlic cloves and get them out of their paper is your own two hands and a decent chef's knife. Take it from world-famous French chef Jacques Pépin, who's probably processed millions of garlic cloves in his life — it's easy if you just use a few simple moves.

The first step to tackling a bulb of garlic is to get the cloves apart. A lot of people remove the cloves from the root of the bulb one by one, but there's an easy way to get them all off at the same time. In many of his television appearances and internet videos, when he's cooking a recipe with garlic, Jacques Pépin uses this neat trick to get the cloves apart.

Place the bulb with the root-side angled down on a hard, flat surface like a cutting board, then hit it with your palm a little bit off-center (so that you don't smash your hand down on the pointy top). If you get a good, solid hit in, the cloves will all come apart — kind of like when you whack a chocolate orange against a table. This works really well, Pépin says, if the bulb is a little bit on the drier side.

Once you get the cloves apart, but before you can get to chopping, you'll have to peel the garlic. This is probably the most frustrating step for most people, because the cloves are sticky and the skin is tough to crack and peel. There are a lot of ways to get the job done — including buying pre-peeled garlic and, of course, a lot of gadgets — but Pépin has a simpler way.

First, cut all the stems off the bottoms of the cloves you plan to use. Next, one at a time, place a clove in front of you on your cutting board, lay your knife flat atop it, and give the clove a solid tap — either with the knife itself (if you have a heavy knife) or by slamming your palm on the top side of the blade. This motion cracks the skin and loosens it, so the clove easily slips out the bottom of its casing when you pick it up by the pointy end (opposite where the stem was).

Now that you've got your cloves all peeled, you'll want to crush them up. Use the same motion you used to get the skins off: Press the flat side of your knife against the clove and hit the knife with your hand — only this time, hit it a little bit harder. This will crush the clove so that you have a relatively flat pile for easy chopping, and it will also release the garlic's essential oils. Finally, rock your knife blade back and forth, blade-edge facing down, through the crushed cloves in order to get finely minced garlic. If you master these few easy steps, you may never have to buy a garlic-gadget ever again.