Too many vampires sucking away your time? Make some roasted garlic. This is a great way to preserve garlic en masse, and it gives foods a garlic-snob taste that shaking out a jar of garlic powder just won’t do.

When you roast garlic, you make the memory of every Italian chef very happy.

And because you put it in a jar and named it “confit” this is a five-star restaurant condiment. It’ll keep for a good long time.

Uses:

  • keeping people away so you can have some alone time or concentrate on work.
  • overriding stale smells in  your kitchen
  • bruschetta
  • roasts (spread this before roasting or insert the cloves into the top/fat layer)
  • sauces
  • dips
  • anywhere you’d use garlic in your life.

Roasted Garlic

  • Servings: 100
  • Difficulty: easy
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INGREDIENTS
    • a ton of garlic. If you hijack a garlic truck, you still won’t have enough garlic.
    • olive oil

 

DIRECTIONS

Step one: Roast the garlic

  1. Cut the tops off the garlic. This is tricky. If you cut too much, you whack off half the garlic. If you cut too little, the olive oil can’t get to those lower cloves. Solution: cut the top off first, then cut around the middle to get those outside cloves. You want to open up the garlic head.
  2. Put the prepped cloves next to each other in a roasting pan. Then, drizzle olive oil on the top.
  3. Roast for about 40 minutes to an hour or until your kitchen is so infused with garlic you need to run for the hills.

Step two: Make the roasted garlic confit

  1. Remove the garlic from the paper. Sometimes it’s easy to squeeze out, but usually this step’s not easy. I use a pairing knife and slide each piece out individually then I bash it on the counter when I get tired of that (which doesn’t work) so I return to patiently taking out each large clove and squeezing the small ones.
  2. Pack it into a mason jar.
  3. After the jar is full, top it off with olive oil.
VARIATIONS

Garlic spread: Pack the garlic tight and use a small amount of olive oil to preserve. This will make a delicious garlic spread.

Garlic oil: Pack the garlic loose and fill the jar with olive oil. You can use the cloves or drizzle the infused oil for cooking.

Garlic and Preserved Lemons: If you have a jar of preserved lemons, top this off with preserved lemon juice, or add a few preserved lemon slices (or small whole preserved lemon) to the jar. You can use this for fish, roasts, tagines, rice flavoring, bruschetta, or salad dressings.

Garlic and herbs: Chop up some fresh herbs and add to the garlic and olive oil. The sky’s the limit here–make an Italian Chef jar with some fresh oregano and basil. Make a French Chef jar with some thyme, sage, or marjoram. Go nuts.

COST: $  If you grew the garlic, this is nearly free.Â