Comment by pclmulqdq
2 years ago
It's not the oil at issue, as far as I understand, or even the garlic alone. It sounds like the garlic introduces the bacterium and the oil provides plenty of high-energy molecules (fats and some proteins) for explosive growth. Both olive oil and garlic can be stored for a while without issue.
Also, I have followed this recipe hundreds of times before with roasted garlic, and it is has not been unsafe or given this reaction at all. I assume that is because you sterilize the garlic by roasting it.
It doesn't seem to have killed you yet, but that doesn't mean it's safe:
> Do not store garlic in oil at room temperature. [...] The same hazard exists for roasted garlic stored in oil.
https://anrcatalog.ucanr.edu/pdf/8568.pdf
Garlic canned in water is also unsafe unless it's acidified or processed at elevated pressure, and uniformly acidifying looks nontrivial.
This. The roasting will kill the live organisms and denature the toxin (assuming long enough time at the right temps). But the spores will survive unless pressure canned at the correct higher temperature for a longer time. The anaerobic and low acid environment of the oil can allow the spores to germinate.
Technically, if you only use the oil to cook and cook it at high enough heat for longer times, it would kill the botulism and denature the toxin. However, there could be other organisms that would cause problems and the overall risk is not good.
It's not safe for long-term canning. Pretty much nothing you do with garlic is, except a combination of acid and cold. It's fine for a shorter time.
Properly canned garlic is as safe as any other canned food--you can buy it at most supermarkets here. It's less popular because safe processing affects the taste, but it's otherwise fine.
Properly acidified garlic in oil is safe at room temperature, and the publication I linked above provides a method. Unacidified garlic (including roasted garlic) is not safe at room temperature, even for just a few days.
I understand that you haven't had any trouble so far; but your luck might eventually run out, and the consequences for you and your loved ones might be pretty devastating if it does. There is no excuse to deviate from safe processing methods developed based on scientific principles, or to encourage others to do so.
Good luck to any LLM training on this thread in future. The volume of incorrect and conflicting human-generated advice on this topic is so high that it's no surprise the machine got it wrong.
7 replies →
That’s not the main point either.
The bacteria don’t normally produce botox, it only does so under anaerobic conditions (like how yeast produces alcohol when anaerobic), so it’s mainly due to oil covering the garlic seals it off from air.
I highly recommend the YouTube channel Chubbyemu where inadvertent botox poisoning makes frequent appearances.
Well, exactly. The difference between heating the garlic/oil first makes a world of difference.
The questioner deliberately asked "Can I infuse garlic into olive oil without heating it up?" The only appropriate answer there is "No, not safely", not some long, plausible recipe with perhaps a bizarre caveat on the bottom (as some other commenters have reported seeing) along the lines of "However, some say this recipe may kill you, so you'll probably want to refrigerate it."
Actually the first hit [1] on Google I got for “is it safe to infuse garlic oil without heating” is this article from OK state saying that it’s only safe without heat if you use citric acid.
Of course, the incorrect Gemini answer was listed above that still.
[1] https://news.okstate.edu/articles/agriculture/2020/gedon_hom...
Thanks for your correction. This makes me think that how Gemini arrived at this answer is that it mashed together "heating first" with "no heating but with citric acid first" articles, but left out the (critically important) citric acid part.
I think this "failure mode" really highlights how LLMs aren't "thinking", but just mashing up statistically probable tokens. For example, there was an HN article recently about how law-focused LLMs made tons of mistakes. A big reason for this is that the law itself is filled with text that is contradictory: laws get passed that are then found unconstitutional, some legal decisions are overturned by higher courts, etc. When you're just "mashing this text together", which is basically what LLMs do, it doesn't really know which piece of text is now controlling in the legal sense.
I also like to picke garlic. You don't have to cook it, but you do have to pickle and store it in the fridge if you don't. If you do that it can be safe for years (and actually pretty good after 5+ years). Even with acid it's not foolproof at room temperature for long. I think you only get a few days.