Recently my parents bought two large bags (I think they're 3lbs each) of garlic. Some of the heads were already beginning to crack and some even began sprouting! In my mind, there was only one thing to do: roast 'em. Roasted garlic has this delicious, mellow and almost sweet taste (some say "nutty"), with just a wee bit of the heat of raw garlic. I love to use it in mashed potatoes, pasta sauces and soups! (Click here to jump to recipe.)
I usually roast, mash and freeze garlic to extend its usefulness. Since I've started buying California garlic (as opposed to garlic grown in China and shipped to Canada), I can't go back to the economy three-pound bags. It tastes awful, has almost no kick, a quarter of the bag is cracked or sprouting and by the time you finish half the bag, the rest of it is cracked or sprouting!
So now I usually only roast the garlic when it's been sitting in the kitchen for a while and maybe has started to crack.
In the past, I followed a method I read online: cut the top tenth off each clove (approximately), just so each bare clove would be visible, wrap each cut bulb in foil, drizzle carefully with olive oil and sprinkle even more carefully with a little salt; close up the tinfoil, arrange the wrapped bulbs in a baking pan and roast slowly for two hours; then painstakingly unwrap each one, pop out the clove; mash, pack and freeze.
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| You can tell by the green dots that this bulb is getting old. But roasting may save them! |
- cut (expose) each clove slightly (else, the garlic would be too mushy to reasonably cut after roasting);
- lubricate and salt the exposed surfaces;
- cover the exposed surfaces tightly (so the cut face would touch whatever it was covered with); then finally,
- roast at low heat for a long time.
If I couldn't wrap each head in foil, maybe I could just flip the cut bulb upside-down. But then, I thought, I'd have to cut either very little off the tallest point of the bulb, or cut so far down that it would create as much waste as product. But wait, why should that top part be wasted? Surely, if I cut the bulb roughly in half, I could use the top half as well!
But for the roasting pan... Metal would heat up too quickly (especially the metal pans we have!) and burn the cut faces before the rest of the bulb cooked. I decided to try the Pyrex baking dishes we had; although I presume ceramic would also have worked (since glaze is essentially glass).
I dug out the 9x11 and 9x9 -inch Pyrex baking dishes, drizzled in olive oil and sprinkled in a little salt. Between the two pans I got about 11 heads of garlic, halved, to fit snugly.
Since my dad was making a standing rib roast, I used the pre-heated oven and roasted my garlic at 225F for about 2 hours. Unfortunately, both dishes wouldn't fit on the same rack, and the garlic from the lower rack ended up caramelising a little more than expected.
Above: after roasting. The left picture shows a top half head, after pulling away the paper. On the right is a lower half; because of the shape of the curve, and the way the cloves attach to the roots, these ones need to be squeezed or poked out. I used the thin end of a Japanese chopstick for this.
A note of caution! The cloves that began forming sprouts were mealy and flavourless!! However, it was also easy to tell which cloves those were, because they didn't turn soft and nearly homogeneous. Instead, they were yellowish, dry, and the cut faces were slightly speckled. Basically, if the clove doesn't look like the picture on the above right, it's not worth using. As much as I dislike waste, it's really of no culinary use any more.
Into the food processor (attachment for my hand-held stick blender, omigosh I love that thing!) go about 3/4 of the garlic. This batch, I pureed until smooth. The remainder, I only pulsed a bit to break up the pieces. This makes for an excellent texture later on!
I mixed the processed garlics together, then divided into two (although three would have been easier to manage). I placed each portion on a sheet of waxed paper and spread out to form a line. I folded over the wax paper and used a chopstick to squeeze the garlic into a tube shape; then rolled the wax paper up, folded up the ends, wrapped in plastic wrap and placed in a labelled freezer bag. Mmm!
Slow-Roasted Garlic
Active work: 20 min
Roasting: 2 hr
Software:
- lots of garlic
- olive oil
- pinch of salt
Hardware:
- glass (or possibly ceramic) baking dishes large enough to accommodate your garlic
- straight edge (ruler, chopstick, spatula, etc)
- thin stick (chopstick or skewer) for removing cloves
Method:
Position oven rack to middle and higher (for additional baking dishes, if using). Preheat oven to 225F.
Drizzle olive oil into your baking dishes. Tilt to coat. Sprinkle with salt.
Cut your garlic thusly: Leave as much paper intact as possible. Halve the garlic horizontally (you'll end up with a top and a bottom). Carefully (leave the paper intact) place each half cut-side down into the baking dish. Continue until you've used up all the available space, and each half is in full contact with the dish.
If your oven heats primarily from the top element, you may need to spritz your garlic with water very lightly so the paper doesn't burn. (Mine heats mostly from the bottom so this was not an issue at all for me, and the water could well be completely unnecessary.)
Place baking dishes in oven. Roast for 2 hours or until the cloves are brown and extremely soft.
Remove from oven. First pinch the papers off the top halves (the pointy ones). The cloves should mostly remain on the pan, though some may stick to the paper. Transfer the cloves to a food processor (or large bowl for mashing). Repeat for about half of the bottom halves (root end). You may need to use a thin chopstick or skewer to help remove the cloves.
Tip: If a clove is not soft and moist and brown, and has a visible circle in the middle, chances are it tastes terrible. Go ahead and try it; but if it's mealy and doesn't taste great, don't bother using it.
Process (or mash) the collected cloves, to a fine consistency. Remove from food processor (or if mashing, leave in bowl). Add the remaining cloves. Process (or mash) just to break up the pieces and then mix the two batches together.
Tip: You could alternatively process the entire batch to be smooth (or chunkier!), but I like this consistency the best. I get good distribution of the flavour, with a few surprise chunks now and then.
To store: Spoon out about 1/4 cup of garlic into a line length-wise on a sheet of wax paper. Fold the paper over the garlic, hold that end down, and use the straight edge to push into the roll of garlic, compressing it into a tube. (Alton Brown does this on the show Good Eats; I'm sure there's a video out there.) Fold the ends in and roll the wax paper. Then roll the cylinder tightly in plastic wrap. Repeat for remaining garlic. Then place tubes in a (labelled) heavy duty zip-top freezer bag and freeze.
Enjoy in mashed potatoes, as a spread on toast, in pasta sauces, or whatever application you choose!
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