My Close Personal Relationship With Roast Garlic
By Eric Gillin
Some people are butter families. Or parmesan cheese families. Or ketchup families. For these people, there’s always a stick, or a bowl, or a bottle on stand-by, ready to liven up any meal.
My family was a garlic family.
My dad would buy those enormous jars of minced garlic, the kinds that have been sitting around since the Reagan administration. It went in everything. If we had green beans, he put a hit of minced garlic on it. If we made brisket, minced garlic. Chocolate chip cookies, minced garlic. We used it so much, I didn’t realize what real garlic looked or tasted like until I was much older. To me, garlic was kind of acrid, tinny-tasting, and submerged in brown liquid.
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I continue to love garlic, but my stand-by version is roasted. I make it in big batches and keep it in the fridge. It’s just as cheap as the jarred stuff, but a whole lot more versatile. And making it at home is a snap—just find the pre-peeled garlic in your grocery store. It’ll be refrigerated, probably in the produce section, and you can get a good-sized tub for about five bucks. The rest is almost just as simple.
Preheat the oven to a low temperature, like 275 to 300 degrees. Dump an entire container, or two, into a Dutch oven. (It should cover the bottom of the pot, and then some.) Pour in vegetable oil (blending in olive oil, if you want) until it just covers the garlic. Throw in a handful of peppercorns, some salt, a few bay leaves, some thyme or rosemary, whatever you have around, red pepper flake. Cover and cook for an hour, maybe a bit more, until the garlic is barely starting to turn golden brown.
When the garlic has cooled, put it in a container and stick it in the fridge. Now you’ve got rich, flavored oil, and super-soft, slightly sweet garlic cloves that you can use to punch up any dish.
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Here are three ways I use it all the time:
1. Make a salad dressing by mashing gloves into a paste, then whisking in a little bit of mustard, dried herbs, lemon juice, salt, pepper and olive oil. Bang. Way better than the bottled stuff.
2. Combine it with mayonnaise and a sprig of chopped rosemary to turn a plain turkey sandwich into a gourmet turkey sandwich.
3. Mash together a few garlic cloves with butter and white wine in the center of the pan to make a quick sauce you can put on anything from vegetables to pasta.
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photo: Courtesy of CNP Montrose
