Health Benefits of Garlic and Creamy Garlic Dressing Recipe

The health benefits of garlic are pretty impressive. It makes food taste yummy, and is a staple ingredient in almost every style of cooking. And it’s good for you! It’s also inexpensive, easy to store, and useful in a variety of home remedies for illness. Using it usually goes something like this –

Man walks in house:  “Mmmm, what’s that smelling so delicious?”

Generally, the only veggies that get this reaction are sautéing onions and/or garlic. You can’t beat the aroma of fresh garlic wafting through the house. (My husband would probably say a savory roast or spicy taco meat might beat it, but we’re talking vegetables here!).

Beyond the bazillions uses for this veggie, in almost every genre of cooking and at every meal, garlic has some incredible health benefits that will get you jumping up and down every time you buy some, and maybe even convince you to include it in more meals than you do now.

Health Benefits of Garlic

While making your food delicious you will also be getting these healthy benefits:

• Vitamin C, B6 and selenium
• Anti-inflammatory
• Anti-fungal
• Anti-bacterial
• Anti-viral
• Improvement of immune function
• Thins blood (can help control blood pressure)
• Increases anti-oxidants/fights free radicals in blood

Garlic can also be an important part of a natural medicine cabinet. It is great for warding off many germs and even working on some health issues or illnesses.

These diseases and issues may show positive results with garlic:

• Colds, flu, stomach viruses (see this soup for a great idea!)
• Infections, including yeast infections
• Can even kill some strains of bacteria (staph) that have become resistant to antibiotic drugs! (see this post for more on bacterial resistance and soaps)
• Heart disease
• High blood pressure
• High triglycerides
• Increase unborn babies’ weight gain
• Helps prevent lots of kinds of cancers
• May remove heavy metals from system
• Diabetes
• Prevent weight gain
• Osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis

Prepping Garlic for Health Benefits

Chopping or crushing garlic before you use it will give you the most nutritional value. If at all possible crush or chop your garlic 7-14 minutes before you need to use it. If you can’t do that though, don’t stress! It’s better to eat garlic without that prep time than to skip it entirely.

Making sure to add garlic near the end of a recipe whenever possible so it cooks for the least amount of time is good. Eating it raw is even better. And, unfortunately, anything that uses whole garlic cloves won’t give you any of the health benefits of garlic.

Storing Garlic

Some people might think it’s silly to save 30 seconds, but when you’re making everything from scratch, every second adds up.

Since garlic is supposed to be kept in the dark anyway, rather than keep it on the counter in a bowl or in the basement with the onions, I’ve started keeping a few heads right in the knife drawer.

See? My favorite knife (found on Amazon), garlic, cutting board – all the things I need to actually use the garlic in cooking, all within 12 inches of each other. The garlic press is right there, too.

I used a cottage cheese tub – free storage! – to keep the little garlic skins from getting everywhere in the drawer.

There are things to look for and do when you buy, store and cook with garlic. And just for fun, a good laugh about my first experiences with fresh garlic.

Garlic AND onions also help when grilling meat. Research shows that grilled meats have carcinogenic (cancer-causing) chemicals, and these veggies can reduce them. Use this meat marinade for grilling for a great one-two punch on carcinogens!

There are fascinating tips for emergency medicinal uses of garlic here.

Increasing My Garlic

I was thinking about how much more garlic I go through than my recipes would indicate, and I wondered if anyone else cooks with garlic like I do:

• If a recipe calls for one clove, I use two.
• If a recipe calls for 2-3 cloves, I use five.
• If a recipe calls for garlic powder, I find a way to make it fresh.
• If a recipe calls for onions but not garlic…chances are good I’ll throw some garlic in, anyway!
• When making up my own recipes, pretty much anything with meat gets at least one clove of fresh, crushed garlic.

A Garlic Recipe – Creamy Garlic Dressing

I couldn’t give you all this great garlic-y information without a recipe to go with it, right? This dressing uses raw garlic – go easy at first. Raw garlic can taste sharp or spicy if you aren’t used to it. If you don’t know how to crush garlic, it’s easy. Lay a clove (still in the papery skin) on a cutting board and put the flat side of a chef’s knife (or large knife) on it. Then smack it with your hand.

Tearing off the papery part will be easy now, and you can include the clove in a blended recipe already, press it in a garlic press or finely mince with a knife for use in recipes. We even teach kids how to do this in our Kids Cook Real Food eCourse, Advanced Level!

Creamy Garlic Dressing

 

Print

Prep time

10 mins

Total time

10 mins

 

Author: Katie Kimball

Ingredients

• ½ cup plain yogurt (homemade is best!)
• ½ cup homemade mayo
• 2 crushed garlic cloves
• ½ tsp mustard powder
• ½ tsp vinegar
• ½ tsp olive oil
• ½ tsp lemon juice
• salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

1. Just mix and enjoy. Store refrigerated; lasts as long as your mayo or yogurt would to begin with. This is a great way to get in your immunity-boosting fresh garlic!

3.4.3177

Get more salad dressing recipes:

• Simple & Festive Greek Salad Dressing
• Homemade Caesar Dressing
• Asian Toasted Sesame Dressing
• Homemade Italian Dressing
• Ranch Dressing or Dip