On Powders

 Yeeeech. My beautiful, loving, caring son is at a phase where he's learning to share. And one thing he often wants to share is his food. From his grubby little hands - or, even worse, his grubby little mouth. What does one do? I don't want to shut him down; I want him to know that I'm proud and happy that he wants to share what he has with other people.

I am getting sick of eating gritty grapes, though.


So a few weeks ago, in response to my last recipe, Trey was all like, "Onion and garlic powder? What the heck is up with that? Aren't you all about fresh ingredients?"

And I was all, "I'm about the fresh dance moves, yo!" and she was all "No you are not. In fact, I don't think I've ever met anyone who was less about the fresh dance moves than you are." A quick fact-check confirmed that she was, in fact, 100% correct in all particulars. This being the case, I set out to answer her question.


It's a good point - I usually am careful about making sure that the spices I use are fresh and of the highest quality. So why am I willing to use dried garlic and onion powder, rather than just chopping up the delicious-looking bulbs I've got stored in my kitchen?

There are a few simple reasons you might want to go with powders instead of fresh. And, of course, for those times, you can get high-quality onion or garlic powder from the same place you normally buy your spice. What you probably can't do is make your own - that requires dehydration and fine grinding. Now, if you have a home dehydrator, it's possible - but from what I've seen, home dehydrators still leave a good deal of water in the final product - as much as a fifth of what was there originally. I haven't tried it myself, but I don't think that's enough to powder the final product. 

So enough with the what - let's get on with the why. When you think about it, the basics here are pretty obvious. Sometimes, you want the flavor of onion or garlic on your food, but you don't want the texture. A good example would be the recipe Trey was commenting on - it's hard to include raw onion or garlic in breading, but powders work fine. Texture doesn't only matter for cookability - it matters in the mouth, as well. Garlic bread is another application; most people like garlic bread, but not everyone likes garlic enough to want to bite into a mouthful of (even minced) garlic cloves. (Some people do, of course. Hey, some people juggle geese.)

Sometimes, the actual plant matter has other qualities you don't want to introduce into your food, like water. Everything you pull out of the ground is gonna be 80% water or more, and sometimes you want to be able to cook without all that water getting into your food. You're not supposed to infuse olive oil at home using fresh garlic - it's a good recipe for botulism. I suspect that you can get almost as good - and much safer - results using a powder.

Finally, powders are a lot easier to control, quantity-wise. For some reason, recipes - and I'm not exempting myself - tend to include raw onion by volume, rather than weight. That's just stupid. What the heck is a cup of chopped onion? One person's cup might include twice as much onion as another. Until everyone - and I'm not exempting myself - starts breaking out the kitchen scales to measure out the onion, powder is the best bet to get a controllable amount every time.

I'm ignoring the first and most obvious reason that most people actually use powders - convenience. Onion powder doesn't rot, and it doesn't take five minutes to chop up. You measure it out or just dump a bunch of it into your recipe. No dishes, no cutting board, no mess. It's always sitting there in the closet, and you rarely have to worry that you're out.


Now, this is not meant to be a ringing endorsement of onion powder, garlic powder, or any similar thing. (Red pepper flakes, on the other hand, are great. Ring, ring, ring.) In the vast majority of applications, you're going to get much, much more flavor by cooking with raw onion or garlic than you are by using powders. But as long as you're buying high-quality goods, not letting them sit around for too long, and using an appropriate amount - 1/8 teaspoon garlic powder = 1 clove, 1 teaspoon onion powder = 1 small onion - then powders are an appropriate weapon to add to our arsenal of spices.


One thing to watch out for - always use powders, never salts. While I don't have a problem using garlic salt for one particular application - grilled corn - in general, it's always better to add salt and garlic powder separately. Garlic and salt are NOT interchangeable; you really want to know how much of each you're adding into the mix.


Finally, please note that onion is bad for housepets - and for some reason, onion powder especially so, and especially dogs. Onion powder is toxic to dogs. Weird.


Join me tomorrow, when finally, after eight months and about a dozen promises, I do what I wanted to do in the second week -

I PICKLE.

(I made them last week. I haven't eaten one yet. I really hope they're good.)