About a month ago, I made garlic chips (and its delicious residual oil) for the second time ever, and without intending to sound arrogant, the chips and the oil came out perfectly. The first time I attempted this about three years ago, I burned a lot of my garlic chips and they tasted bitter; I had waited too long and let the garlic brown in the oil, at which point they will get overcooked and thus bitter. This time, I did a proportion of one bulb’s worth of garlic cloves to one-third cup of neutral oil. I heated the oil on medium heat until it got hot enough so that when a garlic piece was dropped in, it would lightly bubble. Then, I dropped all the garlic slices into the oil and let it fry for about 7-8 minutes, stirring occasionally until the garlic pieces turned a faint golden color. I shut off the heat, strained the garlic chips with a fine sieve, drained the garlic oil into a mason jar. And voila, I had garlic chips and oil to add to a Thai soup called gaeng jued that I made! It was really the perfect topping and flavor accent to this soup.

Today, I figured I would double this, so I used two bulbs of garlic to two thirds cup oil. Not thinking straight and trying to save time on de-skinning the garlic cloves individually, I nuked them in the microwave for 30 seconds before adding them to the oil. And well, the extra moisture from the microwaving prevented them from ever crisping up. The rule of dropping things into hot oil and hoping they will get crispy is that you need to make sure whatever you are frying is as dry as possible. And well, I did the opposite since I was clearly not of sound mind at the time and just trying to multitask. So while the oil turned out delicious and fragrant, the garlic “chips” ended up being a huge mass of garlic mush, having absorbed too much of the oil and thus never crisping up at all.

I was really upset with myself. That took a lot of my time and energy, and I ended up with a result I was not happy with. In the end, I’ll likely throw the garlic from this mini disaster into a stir-fry, but it still upset me because I really hate it when I don’t get the result I want in the kitchen; this is when my perfectionist tendencies really come out… So I decided to try it again. And this time, I got distracted by having Kaia around, and the garlic chips got too brown and turned out bitter once again. I think the multitasking didn’t help, but I also think that scaling is just hard. As much as I’d want to double the recipe, maybe I just don’t know my stovetop well enough to scale this up, even if it’s only twice as much. I failed to get the oil temperature right — it was clearly too hot. So next time, I’m just going to stick with one bulb of garlic to one-third cup of oil, and make sure to do this when I do not have my toddler around to distract me. Hot oil needs 100 percent of my attention — sorry, Pookster.