Roasted Garlic Oil
Glenda Brown
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La Belle Cuisine - More Essentials

Fine Cuisine with Art Infusion

"To cook is to create. And to create well...is an act of integrity, and faith."

Roasted Garlic & General Garlic Information

"Garlic is as good as ten mothers."
~ Les Blank

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A Strand of Garlic
Jardine
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Gemuse III
Hammerle, J.
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Ail
Duey, Adrien
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Roasted Garlic Purée


Kitchen Sessions with Charlie Trotter
by Charlie Trotter, 1999, Ten Speed Press

“Always make extra of this. Once you make it,
you will find numerous uses for it.”

Yield: about 3/4 cup

4 garlic bulbs, tops cut off
3 cups milk
1/2 cup olive oil

Method – Simmer the garlic and milk in a small saucepan for 10 minutes. Drain and discard the milk. Place the garlic bulbs upright in a small oven-proof pan and add the olive oil. Cover with a tight-fitting lid or aluminum foil and bake at 350 degrees [F] for 1 1/2 hours, or until the garlic bulbs are soft.
Cool the garlic in the oil and then squeeze the soft garlic out of the skins. Purée the garlic and the oil until smooth.

 
And a slightly simpler version for one head of garlic...
 

The White Dog Cafe Cookbook
by Judy Wicks and Kevin von Klause, 1997, Running Press

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Cut the top off of the head of garlic, exposing the cloves. Rub the head with a little olive oil and wrap in foil.
Roast in the oven until the cloves are completely soft, about 30 minutes. When cool, squeeze the softened garlic pulp from its skin; it will have a pastelike consistency.

Garlic (Aglio)


Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking
by Marcella Hazan, 1992, Alfred A. Knopf

“To equate Italian food with garlic is not quite correct, but it isn’t totally wrong, either. It may strain belief, but there are some Italians who shun garlic, and many dishes at home and in restaurants are prepared without it. Nevertheless, if there were no longer any garlic, the cuisine would be hard
to recognize. What would roast chicken be like without garlic, or anything done with clams, or grilled mushrooms, or pesto, or an uncountable number of stews and fricassees and pasta sauces?
When preparing them for Italian cooking, garlic cloves are always peeled. Once peeled, they may be used whole, mashed, sliced thin, or chopped fine, depending on how manifest one wants their presence to be. The gentlest aroma is that of the whole clove, the most unbuttoned scent is that exuded
by the chopped. The least acceptable method of preparing garlic is squeezing it through a press. The sodden pulp it produces is acrid in flavor and cannot even be sautéed properly.
It is possible, and often desirable, for the fragrance to be barely perceptible,
a result one can achieve by sautéing the garlic so briefly that it does not become colored, and then letting it simmer in the juices of other ingredients as, for example, when thin slices of it are cooked in a tomato sauce. On occasion, a more emphatic garlic accent may be appropriate, but never, in good Italian cooking, should it be allowed to become harshly pungent or bitter. When sautéing garlic, never take your eyes off it, never allow it to become colored a dark brown because that is when the offensive smell and taste develop. In a few circumstances, when the balance of flavors in a dish demand and support a particularly intense garlic flavor, garlic cloves may be cooked until they are the light brown color of walnut shells. For most cooking, however, the deepest color you should ever allow garlic to become
is pale gold.

Choosing and storing: Garlic is available all through the year, but it is best when just picked, in the spring. When young and fresh, the cloves are tender and moist, and the skin is soft and clear white. The flavor is so sweet that
one can be careless about quantity. As it ages, and unfortunately, outside of the growing areas, older garlic is what one will find, it dries, losing sweetness and acquiring sharpness, its skin becoming flaky and brittle, its flesh wrinkled and yellow, like the color of old ivory. It is still good to cook with, but you must use it sparingly and cook it to an even paler color than you would the fresh. I have seen chefs split the clove to remove any part of it that may
have turned green. I don’t find this necessary, but I do discard the green shoot when it sprouts outside the clove.
Choose a head of garlic by weight and size. The heavier it feels in the hand, the fresher it’s likely to be, and large heads have bigger cloves that take longer to dry out. Use only whole garlic, do not be tempted by prepared chopped garlic, or garlic-flavored oils, or powdered garlic. All such products are too harsh for Italian cooking.
Keep garlic in its skin until you are ready to use it. Do not chop it long
before you need it. Store garlic out of the refrigerator in a crock with a lid fitting loosely enough so air can flow through. There are perforated garlic crocks made that do the job quite well. Braids of garlic can look quite beautiful hanging in a kitchen, but the heads dry out fairly quickly and
all you will have left at some point are empty husks."