I’ve long been an advocate of fresh lemon juice for everything but canning (where I often use it so that the pH is consistent and there are no food safety issues with recipes), but since dietary restrictions have made it difficult in recent years for me to digest raw garlic (which is depressingly delicious, though high in oligosaccharides and therefore high FODMAP), I’ve been looking for alternatives.
Instead, I’ll use a whole lot of green onion – the green part only, as per the low-FODMAP diet I was on for a while, which was helpful for identifying what was causing me trouble and finding some foods that soothed my stomach). Or I’ll roast garlic, which seems to be a little better, but not great. And lately I’ve even been chopping it finely and cooking it in soups, stews, curries, dals and stir-fries, which has been all right.
But raw garlic is still impossible for me. And that’s a problem, because I love a garlic-y tahini sauce and a vegan butter sauce full of chopped herbs. I recently made those two items back-to-back an article and a television segment, respectively.
Garlic flavour without the FODMAPs
And that’s when I was glad that ReaLemon’s PR company had sent me their garlic-infused lemon juice. Now I could have a garlic flavour without the oligosaccharides in high-FODMAP garlic. I’d figured I’d use it on fish or barbecued chicken or fish in the summer, but I found the garlic flavour harsh and the lemon more acidic than fruity when squeezed straight onto food. At first I thought it was just me, but then I did a comparison with fresh lemon juice and it was a world of difference. Actual lemon, freshly squeezed, has floral notes, a fruitiness that the bottled stuff doesn’t. I can drink straight lemon juice; I can’t drink straight ReaLemon, garlic-flavoured or not.
BUT! Then came that tahini sauce and that compound vegan butter. I could make roasted garlic instead of using raw, but was I really going to roast a whole head of garlic and figure out some alternative to aluminium foil or a bucketful of olive oil so the cloves would end up pulpy instead of fibrous? Nope, not when it was for a recipe that was supposed to be simple. That’d be three extra steps! Even though I didn’t mind personally, I know my readers would be less okay with it. We’re not lazy people. We just don’t like wasting time.
And that’s when a funny thing happened. I realized that while adding the garlic-infused juice to roasted vegetables killed the garlic flavour for me, in small quantities, when you just need the aroma of garlic and the lemon is just there to balance, ReaLemon infused with garlic is really helpful. And it’s just so easy. You don’t need to juice any lemons and you don’t need to chop anything. There’s a usefulness-to-practicality ratio that sometimes swings in favour of ReaLemon. And the price is right at less than $2.00 a bottle.
I won’t be giving up fresh lemon juice or roasted garlic any time soon, but as long as I can’t handle raw garlic in a dish and green onions just won’t cut it, I’ll be using ReaLemon. There’s a time and a place.
So, thumbs up to ReaLemon. Make your low-FODMAP culinary life a little easier, just choose your garlic-infused recipes wisely.
Photo by Giulia May on Unsplash.
Disclaimer: I wasn’t paid by ReaLemon to write this. I was given free samples; the opinions above are my own.
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