Crush raw garlic and you release allicin, pungent and full of character, as in Spanish ajo blanco. Slip it cooked into hot oil instead, and it mellows: the heat disables that very reaction. As for its antioxidants, Carole Minker notes that what happens to them during cooking remains poorly understood.
Why does crushing garlic change everything?
heat disables the enzyme responsible for forming allicin, the pungent compound that only appears when garlic is crushed or cut raw
As long as it's sleeping whole inside its bulb, a garlic clove is the picture of restraint: no smell, no sting, no tears. Cut it, or crush it under the flat of a knife, and everything changes. Alliin, that quiet sulphur compound, turns into allicin, the molecule that gives garlic its character (and its legendary breath). No mysterious alchemy here, just a matter of cells being cracked open.
That one simple move is also what separates garlic cooked and mellowed in hot oil from garlic eaten raw and utterly upfront. Ajo blanco, the chilled Spanish soup made by blending almonds with garlic, plays exactly that card: the garlic stays raw, fully transformed, fully itself. Here, garlic owns its rawness, with no apology.
What happens to garlic once it hits the pan?
Once a clove slips into a hot pan, something happens inside it that the eye can't catch. As Carole Minker points out, heat disables the enzyme responsible for forming allicin, the pungent compound that only appears when garlic is crushed or cut raw. Cooked, garlic simply stops producing it the same way.
But cooking doesn’t tell the whole story. What it does to garlic’s antioxidants remains, by Minker’s own admission, poorly understood: some may survive the trip through the pan, others may fade along the way. Better to own that uncertainty than promise an effect nobody really knows about.
In the end, garlic never plays the same tune twice, depending on the hand that works it: crushed, then left to rest before being served raw, as in ajo blanco, it keeps all its fire and apologises for nothing; dropped straight into hot oil, a very different character settles in, muted, its antioxidants left to negotiate something or other with the heat. Nothing absolute in any of this, just a clove that changes face, roughed up or soothed by the hand that holds it.
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