Video of two women comparing their methods for dealing with garlic. The first used a meat pounder, which seemed to work great. She also demonstrated adding some coarse salt if she wanted the garlic mash to be very fine. The second woman used the knife blade flat in a similar fashion (which from what little research I did appeared to be a Shun Santoku), but took more time than the meat pounder approach. There’s a lot of meat pounders on Amazon that range in price from $15-60, but for this purpose, I wonder if a hand dumbbell weight wouldn’t work just as well. In any event, my Zyliss garlic press just got put in the bottom drawer.
I’d seen the smashing garlic approach using a knife before about thirty years ago from a friend who worked in a deli and more recently a few years ago on TV from Martin Yan using a Chinese cleaver. As I recall, Martin used a smash/sweeping motion with the cleaver to make the garlic a paste in one stroke.