How big a garlic clove?

Question

How big (grams) is a clove of garlic, as found in a recipe?

I have a lot of recipes that call for some number of cloves of garlic. The problem is that garlic is a plant, and the size of the clove varies greatly. My local supermarket sells heads of garlic with really large cloves -- I weighed some tonight while cooking and they clocked in around 30g. On the other hand, the local convenience store sells small, roughly uniformly-sized heads of garlic in a mesh sheath whose cloves are about 10g each. This is a huge variation in size and weight!

My recipes generally don't include weights, they just say things like "5 cloves garlic". Is there any "standard size" for a clove, or even a "rule of thumb" that I can use? (This is literally the difference between 150g and 50g of garlic in a dish ... or the difference between a 'garlic bomb' and possibly something that's under-flavored.) _{I'm just really tired of accidentally making dishes that taste overwhelmingly of garlic ...}

Answer 1

At some point you have to accept that cooking isn't totally precise. This is one of those points. Even so some recipes do call for "a fat clove of garlic" to guide you (you could use 2 or even 3 little ones).

As well as varying in size, garlic varies in strength, which you can't measure. The flavour also mellows with cooking, which you can but not realistically to enough precision.

If you like garlic, you can bias towards more, if you think the merest hint is appropriate, bias towards less. Cooking a single portion, weighing garlic would need accuracy of the order of 1g anyway, which most scales can't really do even if they count in single grams; until recently less than 5g precision was rare, and that's not enough to discriminate small/medium/large.

Those garlic bulbs with massive cloves are sometimes labelled differently from everyday garlic. I can't often get them but prefer them as I never want one small clove. The other size is more typical, but variation within one bulb can be a factor of 4 (or even more when I grow my own)