24 juil. 2025

Cooking Without Garlic or Onion: Tips and Recipes

Dropping garlic and onion costs almost nothing nutritionally. Two cloves of garlic weigh about 6 g and supply 6 kcal and 32 mg of potassium, which is 1.6 % of the Swiss reference value. The real problem sits somewhere else entirely. The three substitutes everyone recommends, soy sauce, miso and mustard, are among the saltiest things in the cupboard: two tablespoons of soy sauce deliver 4.2 g of salt, or 70 % of the 6 g daily reference intake. You swap a vegetable containing zero salt for a condiment containing 14 g per 100 g, and most articles on the subject never mention it.

So this page starts from two concrete questions. What do you actually lose when you take these two bulbs out, and how do you rebuild depth of flavour without wrecking your sodium budget. Along the way, four situations need separating, because people constantly conflate them and they call for completely different substitutions.

Four reasons to drop them, four different kitchens

The most common mistake is treating “no garlic, no onion” as a single constraint. It is not.

Fructan sensitivity affects people following a low-FODMAP protocol for irritable bowel syndrome. The culprit is a carbohydrate called fructan, which is not absorbed in the small intestine, draws in water and ferments in the colon. It is water soluble, not oil soluble. That property changes everything, as we will see below: it is what makes garlic-infused oil work, and it also allows garlic or onion pickled in vinegar and then drained, both listed in a 2025 review in the Journal of Neurogastroenterology and Motility on applying the low-FODMAP diet to Asian cuisines.

Garlic allergy is an IgE-mediated immune reaction and has nothing to do with the above. It rules out traces, and it also rules out the oil workaround. A 2024 case series in the World Allergy Organization Journal analysed 132 self-reported garlic allergies in the American FARE registry, representing 1 % of that registry: 56 % of those patients had attended an emergency room, 19 % had been hospitalised and 6 % admitted to intensive care. This is not digestive discomfort.

Religious prohibition, in Jain cooking in particular, applies to plants of the genus Allium as such. Shallot, leek, chives and spring onion all fall under the same rule. An article suggesting shallot as an onion substitute has entirely missed this constraint.

Plain dislike of the taste or the breath, finally, leaves everything open: leek, chives, infused oil, whatever you prefer.

These four cases do not overlap. The rest of this page says, each time, which ones apply.

What you actually lose by removing them

Articles that describe garlic and onion as “rich in beneficial sulphur compounds” imply you are sacrificing something significant. The numbers say otherwise.

According to the Swiss Food Composition Database, raw garlic supplies 107 kcal, 6.4 g of protein and 530 mg of potassium per 100 g. Respectable figures, but nobody eats 100 g of garlic. Two cloves weigh 6 g: 6.4 kcal, 0.38 g of protein, 32 mg of potassium against a nutrient reference value of 2000 mg. Raw onion comes in at 39 kcal, 1.1 g of protein and 140 mg of potassium per 100 g, so half an onion at 60 g gives you 23 kcal, 0.66 g of protein, 84 mg of potassium and 2.3 mg of vitamin C, which is 2.9 % of the 80 mg NRV set by Annex 10 of the Swiss food information ordinance.

The usual replacement generally puts you ahead. A 150 g leek used in place of that half onion supplies 48 kcal, 2.2 g of protein and 28 mg of vitamin C according to the French ANSES Ciqual table, or 35 % of the NRV: twelve times the vitamin C of the onion it replaced. Raw celeriac reaches 460 mg of potassium per 100 g in the Swiss database, against 140 for onion.

That leaves the health argument, which comes up often. Trials do exist: a 2025 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Nutrition covering 10 randomised trials measured a 4.21 mmHg drop in systolic blood pressure (95 % CI -5.74 to -2.69) in hypertensive participants, and a 2026 meta-analysis in Nutrition Reviews across 108 trials and 7137 participants found total cholesterol down by 10.21 mg/dL (95 % CI -13.69 to -6.74). These trials used extracts and standardised preparations, not a clove crushed into a stir-fry. Nothing in that literature justifies worrying about your blood pressure because you left two cloves out of a recipe.

The real cost of replacing them: salt

This is the point the substitute lists systematically skip. Garlic and onion contain no salt at all; the Swiss database records 0 g per 100 g for both. The condiments proposed to replace them are saturated with it.

Ingredient	Salt per 100 g	Salt per usual portion	% of the 6 g reference intake
Raw garlic	0 g	0 g for 2 cloves (6 g)	0 %
Raw onion	0 g	0 g for half an onion (60 g)	0 %
Soy sauce	14 g	2.1 g per tablespoon (15 g)	35 %
Miso	8.35 g	0.63 g per bowl (recipe below)	10 %
Mustard	4.1 to 6.3 g	0.21 to 0.32 g per teaspoon	4 to 5 %
Prepared vegetable stock	0.9 g	2.7 g per 300 ml bowl	45 %
Tomato paste	0.27 g	0.08 g per 30 g	1.3 %
Dried shiitake	0.03 g	0.003 g per 10 g	0.05 %

Sources: Swiss Food Composition Database V7.1 for garlic, onion, soy sauce, mustard and prepared stock; ANSES Ciqual 2020 for miso, tomato paste and dried shiitake.

The scale is worth pausing on. Mean global sodium intake measured by the WHO was 4278 mg per day in 2021, roughly 11 g of salt, against a recommendation of under 5 g. A recipe that compensates for missing garlic with two tablespoons of soy sauce adds 4.2 g of salt on its own. Annex 13 of the Swiss ordinance sets the threshold for a “low in salt” claim at 0.12 g of sodium per 100 g, raised to 0.36 g for condiments and mustard: soy sauce exceeds even that relaxed threshold fifteenfold, miso ninefold.

The practical consequence is simple. Umami substitutes fall into two families that need dosing differently. Salted ferments (miso, soy sauce, tamari, mustard) belong on a teaspoon, never a ladle. Unsalted concentrates (tomato paste, dried mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, nutritional yeast) deliver depth without touching the sodium counter. At comparable flavour depth, a broth built on tomato paste and dried mushrooms carries roughly ten times less salt than one built on soy sauce. Our guide to seasoning without salt using herbs, spices and citrus covers the technique in detail.

The potassium in those unsalted concentrates pulls in a helpful direction too. A 2026 meta-analysis in JACC Asia, across 21 trials and 29,570 participants, measured a 4.7 mmHg drop in systolic blood pressure (95 % CI -5.7 to -3.6) with potassium-enriched salt substitutes. Tomato paste contains 1010 mg of potassium per 100 g and dried shiitake 1530 mg. That is not medicine, but the direction is consistent.

Garlic-infused oil: why it works, and what nobody tells you

This is the most useful trick on the whole list, and the worst explained. Garlic fructans are soluble in water and not in oil. When you warm cloves gently in oil and then remove them, the fat-soluble aroma compounds move into the oil while the fructans stay in the discarded clove. You get the flavour without the fermentable carbohydrate. The 2025 review cited above describes this substitution applied to traditional Indian recipes and notes that sensory evaluation of the modified versions showed no difference from the originals.

The trick only applies to fructan sensitivity. Garlic’s allergenic proteins partly migrate into the oil, so anyone with a diagnosed allergy must stay away from it. And infused oil is still an Allium preparation, so it remains excluded from a Jain diet.

It also has to be stored properly, and this is where nearly every recipe online goes silent. Garlic, mushrooms, chillies and herbs are low-acid foods that can carry Clostridium botulinum spores. Submerged in oil, they sit in an oxygen-free environment, which is exactly what botulinum toxin production requires. Oregon State University Extension publication SP 50-701, revised in January 2025, is explicit: home-made flavoured oils must be refrigerated and used within four days, or frozen for longer storage. The rule holds for versions made with dried garlic and dried herbs too. Commercial garlic-in-oil mixtures, by contrast, are acidified during manufacture, which is what lets them sit on a shelf.

In practice: label the bottle with the preparation date and the use-by date, keep it cold, freeze the surplus in ice cube trays. Botulism remains rare, but it is a serious illness that can reach the respiratory muscles, as the NHS page sets out. Four days in the fridge is not excessive caution, it is the only official guidance available. Our guide to home-made flavoured oils applies the same rule.

The chives trap

One piece of advice circulates everywhere: try chives, because they are “often better tolerated”. Where allergy is involved, that is bad advice.

The clinically relevant allergen identified in garlic is alliin lyase, a 56 kDa protein. It shows strong cross-reactivity with the alliin lyases of leek, shallot and onion, and of the 132 FARE registry patients, 34 also reported an allergy to another member of the family. Chives, spring onion, shallot, garlic scapes and leek are therefore not safe substitutes for someone with a confirmed garlic allergy. They are immunological cousins.

One useful detail does emerge: the protein is heat labile, degrading to 10 kDa after five minutes of heating, which explains why cooked garlic is less allergenic than raw. That is not a substitute for medical advice, and nobody should self-test tolerance to a food that once sent them to an emergency room. Garlic allergy also tends to be diagnosed later than other food allergies: 41 % of cases after age 25, against 15 % for the registry’s other single food allergies.

For fructan sensitivity, by contrast, the green parts of leek and spring onion remain perfectly usable, because fructans concentrate in the white and the bulb. That is a distinction between parts of the plant, not between species.

Asafoetida: effective, but read the label

Asafoetida, or hing, is the powdered resin of several Ferula species. Heated for a few seconds in fat, it gives a sulphurous note that genuinely recalls cooked garlic and onion. It is the standard aromatic stand-in in Allium-free Indian cooking, and the 2025 review explicitly recommends it as a replacement for onion flavour, optionally combined with ginger.

One practical caveat applies. Powdered asafoetida is almost always cut with a neutral carrier, and that carrier is most often wheat flour, sometimes gum arabic or rice flour. Anyone with coeliac disease needs to check the ingredient list and look for a gluten-free declaration or a rice-based version. In Switzerland the packaging makes this checkable: item 1 of Annex 6 of the food information ordinance requires gluten-containing cereals, wheat included, to be declared on the label in every case, and Art. 11 para. 1 requires that declaration to stand out through typeface, character style or background colour. If wheat is in there, it has to be visible and emphasised. Pure resin hing exists but is hard to find and far more potent: a few grains will do.

Dosing is the second difficulty. A quarter teaspoon for four people is a maximum; beyond that the sulphurous smell takes over the whole dish. It always goes into hot fat, before the other ingredients, never at the end of cooking. The same principle governs aromatic powders generally, as our guide to spice blends and digestion sets out.

What the low-FODMAP diet actually involves

Since this is the most common reason for removing garlic and onion, the commitment is worth spelling out, because a good share of people who cut out Allium do so by self-diagnosis and permanently, which is not the protocol.

Monash University, which developed the approach, describes a three-step diet. Step 1 restricts FODMAPs and lasts two to six weeks, no longer. Step 2 reintroduces the groups one at a time, through three-day challenges, to identify which ones genuinely trigger symptoms. Step 3 establishes a personalised long-term diet, as broad as possible, restricting only what causes problems. Monash notes that roughly three quarters of people with irritable bowel syndrome improve in step 1, and a quarter do not, in which case the answer lies elsewhere.

The effect is real but not exclusive. A 2026 meta-analysis in Clinical Nutrition covering 10 randomised trials and 939 participants put the low-FODMAP responder rate between 34 and 78 %, with no significant difference from the other dietary interventions tested (RR 1.04, 95 % CI 0.91 to 1.19, P = 0.55). A randomised trial published the same year in Gut Microbes, with twelve-month follow-up, shows the benefit holds up poorly over time without personalisation: the severity score had climbed back 29.3 points above baseline in the low-FODMAP group, against a sustained 78.3 point drop in the personalised group, with 34.5 % responders versus 62.5 % (absolute difference +28.0 %, 95 % CI 4.2 to 47.7).

The British Dietetic Association accordingly recommends starting with simple measures and moving to a low-FODMAP diet only if those fail, with dietitian support. The NHS, on its IBS page, explicitly lists onion among the hard-to-digest foods to avoid when bloating is a problem, but recommends keeping a food diary first. Our article on the low-FODMAP diet applied to vegetarianism covers the trade-offs specific to meat-free eating, where legumes create their own difficulty.

One last, counter-intuitive point. A double-blind crossover trial published in 2024 in BMC Medicine, in 59 participants who considered themselves gluten sensitive, compared challenges of 2.1 g of fructans and 5.7 g of gluten: it was the fructans, not the gluten, that triggered the most symptoms. Plenty of people avoiding bread actually have a problem with onion.

Pickling in vinegar: the overlooked option

Alongside infused oil, the 2025 review names a second technique that rarely makes it into English-language advice: garlic or onion pickled in vinegar and drained before use. The principle is the same as with oil, arrived at from the opposite direction. Fructans are water soluble and migrate into the brine during pickling, so discarding the brine leaves you with a piece of garlic or onion whose fructan content has dropped substantially.

In practice: leave thinly sliced onion rings or garlic slices in white wine vinegar for at least twenty-four hours, drain before use, and keep the brine out of the dish. The flavour shifts towards sharp and mild, which suits salads, sandwiches and grain bowls, and suits a braise considerably less. The same caveat as with oil applies: for an allergy and for a Jain diet the technique changes nothing, because the plant is the same one. Our guide to quick 24-hour pickles covers the related methods and their safety rules.

Building depth without the bulbs

Once the framing is settled, the cooking itself is simpler than people expect. Garlic and onion contribute three distinct things, and you replace them separately.

The pungent sulphur, the thing that makes you say “there’s garlic in this”, comes from organosulphur compounds released when you cut them. You imitate it with asafoetida, or with infused oil, and with nothing else. Ginger and black pepper also bring heat, but a different kind: theirs sits at the front of the tongue and fades faster, while the garlic note lingers at the back. Combining the two gets closest to the original effect. Our inventory of essential spices and herbs for vegetarian cooking lists the other notes available.

The sweetness of melted onion comes from slow cooking: the Swiss database records 39 kcal for raw onion, 43 for steamed and 92 for roasted, with concentration through evaporation doing all the work. You recover it with slowly sweated leek, braised fennel, finely diced carrot stewed twenty minutes under a lid, or cauliflower roasted at 200 °C until brown patches appear.

Body in the mouth, finally, is a matter of umami. The unsalted concentrates do most of it: tomato paste pushed two minutes in hot fat until it darkens, mushrooms seared over high heat without stirring, rehydrated dried shiitake whose soaking water you keep. Nutritional yeast goes in off the heat: 5 g supply 2 g of protein, 1.1 g of fibre and just 0.02 g of salt. Our guides to plant-based umami and to batch-cooked vegetarian soups develop these techniques.

Three cooking moves matter more than any single ingredient. Frying whole spices in hot fat for thirty to sixty seconds, until the first crackle, releases fat-soluble compounds that water cannot dissolve. Deglazing with an acid, cider vinegar or white wine, while scraping the fond off the pan, recovers the Maillard products. And finishing with a fresh acid, lemon juice or zest, sharpens the perception of every other flavour at the moment of serving, which partly compensates for cooking with less salt.

A fourth lever tends to get overlooked: order of operations. In a recipe with onion, the onion is the base because it goes into the pan first and gets twenty minutes to develop sugars. Take it out and add the remaining ingredients in the usual sequence, and you are effectively cooking the same dish with no base at all. The fix is to move another vegetable into first position and give it the same time. Leek whites, fennel and finely diced carrot work; courgette and pepper do not, because they shed too much water and never brown.

And one quantity that gets underestimated far more often than overestimated: mushrooms lose roughly half their weight in the pan. Put 250 g in and you end up with about 125 g on the plate. For two people, 250 g raw is therefore a tight amount rather than a generous one, and it is one of the reasons umami depth goes missing in onion-free recipes: there simply is not enough mushroom in play.

Miso vegetable soup

Serves 4. Works out at roughly 0.63 g of salt per bowl before any additions, almost all of it from the miso.

2 medium carrots (about 200 g), in 5 mm rounds
1 whole leek (about 150 g), white and tender green sliced separately
2 potatoes (about 300 g), in 2 cm dice
1 celery stick (about 60 g), thinly sliced
1 litre of water
30 g of light miso (about 2 tablespoons)
5 g of dried shiitake
1 tablespoon of rapeseed oil
Thyme, rosemary, flat-leaf parsley
Pepper

Soak the shiitake in 200 ml of warm water for 20 minutes, then chop them and keep the soaking liquid. Heat the oil over medium heat, add the leek whites and celery, and sweat for eight to ten minutes without colour, until the leek turns translucent. Add the chopped shiitake, the carrots and the potatoes, then the water and the strained soaking liquid. Add the thyme and rosemary, bring to a bare simmer and cook covered for twenty to twenty-five minutes, until a knife tip goes through a potato without resistance.

Take the pan off the heat. Lift out a ladle of broth, whisk the miso into it until no lumps remain, then stir it back in. Miso is whisked off the heat because high heat destroys its volatile aromatics and turns the broth bitter, not to preserve supposed probiotics: in a pasteurised miso, which is what supermarkets sell, those do not survive packaging anyway. Add the sliced leek greens, let them warm through for two minutes, season with pepper and serve with the parsley.

Do not salt before tasting. If the result seems flat, add a teaspoon of rice vinegar rather than a pinch of salt: what registers as missing is usually acidity.

Vegetable curry with asafoetida

Serves 4.

2 courgettes (about 400 g), in 2 cm cubes
1 aubergine (about 300 g), in 2 cm cubes
1 red pepper (about 150 g), in strips
2 ripe tomatoes (about 250 g), diced, or 200 g of tinned chopped tomatoes
1 tablespoon of tomato paste
1 teaspoon of mustard seeds
1 teaspoon of ground coriander
1 teaspoon of ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon of asafoetida (check for gluten if relevant)
1 teaspoon of turmeric
15 g of fresh ginger, grated
200 ml of coconut milk
2 tablespoons of neutral oil
Pepper, and salt only at the end

Heat the oil over medium-high heat. Add the mustard seeds and wait for them to crackle, thirty to sixty seconds. Lower the heat, add the asafoetida, cumin, coriander and turmeric, and stir for ten to fifteen seconds: any longer and the turmeric turns bitter. Add the grated ginger, then the tomato paste, and push it for two minutes until it darkens and just catches.

Add the aubergine first, with a tablespoon of water, and give it five minutes covered: it soaks up fat and cooks more slowly than everything else. Then add the courgettes and pepper, and fry for five minutes over medium heat, stirring. Stir in the tomatoes, cover and simmer twelve to fifteen minutes, until the aubergine collapses under a fork. Pour in the coconut milk, leave five minutes uncovered to thicken, season with pepper, taste, then salt if it needs it. Serve with basmati rice.

Red lentil and carrot patties

Makes 6 patties.

150 g of red lentils
2 grated carrots (about 200 g)
1 teaspoon of sweet paprika
1 teaspoon of ground cumin
1 tablespoon of nutritional yeast
30 g of oats or chickpea flour
1 tablespoon of lemon juice
Pepper, salt
Oil for frying

Rinse the lentils under cold water until it runs clear, then cook them for ten to twelve minutes in twice their volume of unsalted water, until they fall apart. Drain them thoroughly and let them cool for twenty minutes: a warm mixture will not hold together in the pan.

Combine the lentils, grated carrot, paprika, cumin, nutritional yeast and lemon juice. Add the oats and rest for ten minutes while they absorb the moisture. The mixture should hold when pressed in your palm without sticking to your fingers; add another spoonful of oats if it stays soft. Shape six patties 1.5 cm thick.

Heat a thin layer of oil over medium heat. Lay the patties down and do not touch them for four minutes: that is what builds the crust. Turn them once and give them three to four minutes more. Serve with a yoghurt, lemon and herb sauce.

Lentils contain galacto-oligosaccharides, another FODMAP group. If you are following a low-FODMAP protocol, use rinsed tinned lentils, since some of the GOS has migrated into the brine, as the 2025 review recommends. Our pantry guide to legumes covers the other soaking techniques.

Creamy pasta with basil and mushrooms

Serves 2.

200 g of pasta
250 g of button mushrooms, in 5 mm slices
30 g of fresh basil leaves
1 tablespoon of white almond butter
1 tablespoon of nutritional yeast
1 teaspoon of lemon juice
2 tablespoons of olive oil
Pepper

Cook the pasta in salted water and reserve a cup of the cooking water before draining.

Meanwhile, heat the oil over high heat in a large pan. Add the mushrooms in a single layer and do not stir them for three minutes: stirred too early, they release their water and boil instead of browning, which is the main reason mushrooms so often taste of nothing. Once the underside is brown, toss them and carry on for three minutes.

Blend the basil, almond butter, nutritional yeast, lemon juice and 50 ml of the hot cooking water into a smooth cream. Pour it over the mushrooms off the heat, add the pasta and loosen with a little more cooking water: the starch in it binds the sauce. Season generously with pepper and serve immediately.

What actually belongs on the shopping list

People new to cooking without garlic and onion tend to buy too many replacement products and too little of what actually carries a dish. Four items will get you started.

Dried mushrooms are the single most important purchase, because they are the only thing that delivers both umami and aroma without bringing salt along. Fifty grams keep for months and make roughly five litres of broth. The soaking water always goes into the dish; most of the flavour is in there.

Tomato paste in a tube rather than a tin, because an opened tin spoils quickly in the fridge and you work by the tablespoon anyway. The Swiss database records 77 kcal and 1150 mg of potassium per 100 g, Ciqual 1010 mg for the tinned version. Either way it is the most potassium-dense item on this list.

One light miso, bought on the nutrition declaration rather than the price. A single tub lasts months, because portions are measured in teaspoons.

And whole rather than ground spices, at least for mustard seed, cumin and coriander. The difference is not quality but technique: only whole seeds can be toasted in hot fat, and that step is precisely what replaces part of what the browned onion used to do.

What you do not need: ready-made “onion-free” spice blends, which are generally far more expensive and whose salt content rarely stands out on the pack. A glance at the ingredient list usually puts salt first or second.

Five common mistakes

Compensating with salt instead of acid. A dish without garlic often reads as flat. The reflex is to add salt; a splash of vinegar or lemon juice at the end does the same perceptual work without the sodium.

Treating infused oil like ordinary oil. It keeps four days in the fridge or in the freezer, not in a cupboard next to the hob.

Swapping shallot for onion in cases of allergy or religious prohibition. Shallot is an Allium. That swap only works when taste is the issue.

Measuring asafoetida by the tablespoon. A quarter teaspoon for four people is enough, and the dish turns sulphurous fast beyond that.

Staying in step 1 of the low-FODMAP diet for months. The protocol allows two to six weeks of restriction, then a methodical reintroduction. Prolonged restriction narrows the diet for no benefit.

When you are cooking for other people

At a dinner or in a shared kitchen, what decides the outcome is not technique but the question you ask beforehand. “Are you okay with garlic?” is too vague for that. Two follow-ups are more useful: is this a medically diagnosed allergy, and are traces a problem.

If the answer is yes, what changes is kitchen organisation, not just the recipe. The same chopping board, the same pan and the same wooden spoon are enough to transfer traces, and while garlic proteins are heat labile, they are already dispersed through the oil. In practice: make the allergen-free dish first, with clean equipment, and cook everything else afterwards.

If the issue is fructans, traces are not a problem, because the effect is dose dependent. A spoonful of sauce in which an onion was cooked and then removed will generally trigger nothing; a bowl of onion soup will. That is the central difference between the two most common cases, and it answers the uncertainty that comes up most often at the table.

With religious requirements, finally, showing the ingredient list beats describing the finished dish. And the question that clarifies the most is not about garlic at all but about root vegetables, whose treatment varies with observance.

Depending on your situation

You are following a low-FODMAP protocol. Garlic-infused oil, leek and spring onion greens, asafoetida, ginger, garlic or onion pickled in vinegar and drained. Time-limited restriction, mandatory reintroduction, ideally with a dietitian.

You have a confirmed Allium allergy. No member of the genus at all: no shallot, chives, leek, garlic scapes or garlic-infused oil. Your depth will come from mushrooms, tomato paste, fennel, celery, toasted spices and asafoetida.

You follow a Jain or equivalent diet. The same botanical exclusion as above, plus root vegetables depending on your observance. Asafoetida is the traditional stand-in for precisely this reason.

You simply dislike the taste or the breath. Anything goes. Sweated leek, raw snipped chives and braised fennel will give you a mild aromatic base without the aggressive notes.

You are cooking for someone else. Ask which of the four situations applies before buying anything. The answer changes the shopping list completely, and in the case of an allergy it involves far more than inconvenience. Our allergen-free cooking guide covers the wider question of cooking around restrictions.

Frequently asked questions

What replaces garlic in a tomato sauce? Push a tablespoon of tomato paste for two minutes in hot oil, add a pinch of asafoetida and some dried oregano. The paste brings the umami, the asafoetida the sulphurous note.

Does garlic-infused oil contain FODMAPs? Not once the cloves are removed: fructans are water soluble and do not migrate into oil. The allergenic proteins partly do, which rules the trick out in cases of allergy.

How long does a home-made flavoured oil keep? Four days refrigerated, or frozen for longer storage, according to Oregon State University Extension. Commercial versions are acidified and keep at room temperature.

Is leek allowed on a low-FODMAP diet? The green part, yes, in sensible amounts; the white concentrates the fructans. That is a distinction between parts of the plant, not species.

Does asafoetida contain gluten? The powdered version is almost always cut with wheat flour. Read the ingredient list and look for a rice-based version if you have coeliac disease.

Do I lose health benefits by cutting out garlic? The trials measuring effects on blood pressure or cholesterol used standardised extracts, not culinary amounts. Two cloves in a stir-fry amount to 6 kcal and 1.6 % of the potassium reference value.

Are chives safer than garlic if I am allergic? No. The garlic allergen cross-reacts strongly with those of leek, shallot and onion. Do not self-test.

My dish lacks body without onion. What now? Brown mushrooms over high heat without stirring, add tomato paste pushed in hot fat, and deglaze with vinegar. Missing body is missing umami and missing Maillard reaction, not missing onion.

Limits of this page

The nutritional figures come from composition tables, the Swiss BLV database and the ANSES Ciqual table, which report averages: the salt content of a soy sauce or a miso varies appreciably between brands, and the label on the product you buy takes precedence over these averages. The regulatory thresholds quoted are those of the Swiss food information ordinance and apply only to commercial claims, not to home cooking. The storage guidance for flavoured oils comes from an American university extension service, the only official source accessible on this specific question, and has no binding status in Switzerland. The garlic and blood pressure trials used standardised preparations and do not transfer to cooking. Finally, this page describes culinary and regulatory principles; it replaces neither an allergy diagnosis nor dietitian support for a low-FODMAP protocol.