Re: salt and garlic cooking questions, please
heh! step on my toes? Puhleeze! I like it when everyone helps out, makes me feel like when I take a vacation things won't just fall to pieces while I'm gone. :)
For the pasta dish, I sautee the garlic just enough to flavor the oil. Garlic actually browns and even burns quite quickly, and I like to preserve the enzymes as much as possible, so the warmth is only to aid infusion and to take the sharp taste off.
I use celtic
Sea Salt when I'm cooking something that will dissolve the huge grains of salt because I've yet to find a cheap salt grinder yet! I must admit I still have to occasionally use regular
Sea Salt , not Celtic, argh!!! to get the consistency I want.
If I understand it correctly, minerals are always minerals even after heat. Since they're metal, they really cannot be denatured by heat. The way you lose them is when they escape into the cooking water, if you don't use that water, they're gone. So all you have to do to preserve the minerals is to either make soup or use very little water.