“There’s no such thing as too much garlic.” You hear this a lot. It does the rounds on social media along with other dangerous aphorisms like “everything tastes better with butter.” People even put it in their dating profiles. It’s a statement that’s supposed to convey something about the kind of person you are—whether you pay homage to the Neapolitan garlic-chili-anchovy trifecta or whether you have the sense to add wafer-thin raw garlic to the fatty, smoke-edged pork in your ssam; whether, in short, you like the body-blow intensity of real flavor, or whether you fear it.

It’s an understandable overcorrection. If a ragù has been given the WASP treatment—a recipe for eight people demanding a sprinkling of Italian herbs and just a single clove of garlic, say—then quadrupling the garlic isn’t just good sense, it’s praxis. Still, there has to be a line. Not long ago, a creator on Instagram made a fabled chicken dish that called for 40 cloves of garlic, and added an extra 20 cloves.

A truly great cook doesn’t just pull the pin on a bulb of garlic and launch it into a Le Creuset, they understand its moods and its sensitivities. Garlic is a shape-shifter. Blitz it and it’ll punch back with acrid intensity; slice it to Bible-page translucency and it will wield a clean, sharp flavor; leave it in its skin and give it time and tender heat, and the whole bulb will collapse to fragrant sweetness. Cooked in water, it will be punchy and onion-forward, but temper it with enough oil and its fragrance will mellow and diffuse.

And this doesn’t even take into account the transformation a bulb undergoes as it ages, quietly, on your kitchen countertop. If you take one old clove—papery, dehydrated, pungent—peel it and crush it raw into a yogurt sauce, it will have more brute force than a whole bulb of young cloves roasted in their skins. To love garlic is to love this rewarding capriciousness, and to know that there is such a thing as too much.