The garlic and onion dilemma
People with IBS will often do a low-fodmap diet to see if there are specific “trigger foods”. Onions and garlic are typically public enemy number 1 and 2 for fodmap sensitivities.
Onions and garlic also happen to be in just about all home cooking. It’s hard to open up a recipe in a cookbook and not see onions or garlic in almost every page (unless we’re talking dessert or sushi). They’re also a backbone of the Mediterranean diet.
Is it possible to satisfy these 3 conditions at once?:
Limit or eliminate garlic and onions
Eat a (more-or-less) balanced diet
Not have you food taste bland
I think it is — but you’ll have to get creative and make some compromises.
Garlic and onions play (at least) 2 distinct roles1. First, they have their own distinct flavor. Second, they are used as aromatic bases for many dishes.
Infused oils:
Infused oils are not a silver bullet for replacing onion and garlic flavor because onions and garlic can have many different flavors depending on its prepared (think of raw onion vs caramelized). However, infused oils can do a great job at giving your dish onion or galic flavor without adding any fodmaps (because fodmaps are water soluble they don’t get extracted into infused oils).
Alternative aromatic flavor bases:
Different cuisines have different aromatic flavor bases. Most (not all) of these combinations include either garlic or onion — or both. But with some creativity, you can definitely create a decent aromatic base without them. Take a look at the below table of bases (link to original source):
If you want to get away with no onion or garlic, I’d say bell pepper, ginger, and carrots might become pretty big in your rotation.
There is no perfect formula — but you have options if you want to reduce or eliminate onion and garlic in your diet without sacrificing too much flavor.
Onion is also used as a tenderizer in things like kafka — pretty key ingredient. You can use other acids (vinegar, citrus) as a tenderizer as well.