About onions, garlic, chives and leeks

2007 Every region, province or county in Italy has its own customs when it comes to cooking. And there are rules. Some things you don't do. I once told a friend glowingly about my leg of lamb with gorgonzola and I thought he was going to faint. Gorgonzola! Too greasy! Takes away the flavor! Schifo (pronounced skiefo). While another friend who is quite the experimenter said it could be fine but with the very mild variety.

Do not combine several species in one dish

But she also has her limits. For instance, it is highly questionable if you put several types of garlic together in one dish. So no garlic with onions, no leek with garlic. It is not allowed. I wanted to know more about this. And what did I find out?

I heard a lot of stories: the different kinds of garlic don't tolerate each other. So one takes away the taste of the other. Someone else claimed that they influence each other in such a negative way that they even become poisonous. Slightly, but still.

One explanation has always made sense to me: garlic, onions, chives and leeks put a lot of strain on your digestion and are gas forming. If you already suffer from this, you'll go nuts if you use several types of garlic.

Over the years I've learned that "taking away the flavor of the other garlic" is also a good reason. If you taste carefully, onions and garlic blend together. Or rather, they take on each other's flavor and then you don't even taste them both that well.

No onion in 'storage sauce

There is something else weird with onions: if you make a sauce that you want to keep (see the Pomodoresse) then it is better not to add onions. Somehow the sauce will become less tasty when you reheat it. Garlic is fine, but only if you are making Aglione.

Red onion and garlic: the sting out of it

Onions and garlic are healthy. Garlic purifies the blood for example. But you don't always want that taste because it dominates. The same goes for the red onion: tasty, but used raw it's a bit too much.

You can do something about that: you can boil garlic in water for 10 minutes.

Do you have red onion? And you want to use it in a salad? I learned a trick for that in Italy. Finely chop the onion and leave it (preferably overnight) in lukewarm water with a big splash of red wine vinegar. Then the onion is tasty, but the taste doesn't dominate as much. Or as they say in Italy: you take the sting out of it.