I love cooking, and most dishes I cook contain some kind of onions or garlic in varying amounts. Unfortunately, my partner doesn’t handle them well, so I want to replace them as much as I can.

Leek is one decent alternative to onions, and I’ve recently discovered Asafoetida, a spice that creates an oniony flavor. But onions are also important for texture, especially in saucy dishes, and both leek and spices replace that poorly. Fennel works sometimes but alters the taste.

Garlic generally seems hard to replace, although I’ve had some success with only slightly squashing the cloves and fishing them out before serving.

Anyway, I’m looking for suggestions. Anybody know any good alternatives, any cool tips or tricks I could try?

Edit: To clarify, the issue is that my partner can’t digest them properly and they cause pain (likely a mild food allergy). The flavor is not an issue, and we both enjoy the stuff that we cook apart from this issue.

  • the_artic_oneEnglish
    7·
    6 days ago

    My partner had to eat low FODMAP for a few years but eventually their gut reset and now they can have small to moderate amounts of onions and garlic again. After the onion and garlic, the biggest hurdle to keeping low FODMAP is cutting out high fructose corn syrup because it’s in so many packaged foods you wouldn’t think about like certain brands of breadcrumbs (Progresso).

    My number 1 suggestion is to make your own onion infused olive oil: put a roughly-chopped onion in a pot with a whole bottle of olive oil, warm it up (it should be warm not hot), let it cool, take out the onion pieces, and pour it back in the bottle (store in the fridge to preserve the flavor longer). You can do this for garlic as well but garlic-infused oils are a lot easier to find at the the store (just make sure you get infused oils that don’t contain actual bits of garlic or juice, Boyajin was a brand I liked a lot).

    I used to make fajitas without onions by using my infused oils in the marinade and upping the amount of bell pepper.

    • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
      3·
      6 days ago

      The recommendation is to only make as much onion or garlic oil as you can use at the time as they are a risk of botulism. The commercial products have additional processing (usually acidification) to make them shelf stable.