This is barely a recipe. It is garlic, olive oil and heat, left alone for an hour, and at the end of it you have two things instead of one: cloves gone sweet and spreadable, and a jar of oil perfumed with garlic that will quietly improve everything you cook for the next fortnight.
It is the single highest return on effort in this entire journal. The effort is peeling.
Ingredients
- 3 whole heads of garlic, broken into cloves and peeled, about 40 cloves
- Enough good olive oil to cover them completely, roughly 300 ml
- 3 sprigs of rosemary
- 1 dried chilli, or a pinch of flakes (optional)
- A strip of lemon peel (optional, and very good)
- Flaky salt
Method
- Heat the oven to 140 °C. Low and slow is the entire technique. This is not roasting.
- Put the peeled cloves in a small ovenproof dish, snug in one or two layers. A small dish means less oil to cover them. A mini cocotte is perfect.
- Tuck in the rosemary, the chilli and the lemon peel, then pour over olive oil until every clove is submerged. Any garlic standing proud of the oil will brown and turn bitter.
- Lid on, or foil, and into the oven for 50 to 60 minutes.
- Check at 50. The cloves should be pale gold and yield instantly to a spoon, no resistance at all. If they still have bite, give them another 10 minutes. If they are turning dark brown, the oven is too hot and you have gone slightly too far, though they will still taste good.
- Cool completely in the oil. Season the cloves with a little flaky salt as you serve them.
What to do with it
The obvious one. Thick toast, a few cloves crushed straight onto it with the back of a fork, flaky salt, a spoonful of the oil, and a scattering of dill. That is dinner, if the day has been long enough.
The one that matters here. Crushed confit garlic under a sardine on toast. The sweetness of the garlic against the salt of the fish is the best five seconds available in your own kitchen. We would not say this lightly.
The oil. Do not treat it as a byproduct. It is arguably the better half. Dress tomatoes with it. Finish a soup. Fry an egg in it and understand your life differently. Toss it through pasta with nothing else but pepper and cheese.
Mash the cloves into butter for fish, into mayonnaise for a startling aioli, into yoghurt with lemon for a dip that takes four seconds.
Keeping it
Store the cloves submerged in their oil in a sealed jar in the fridge, and use them within a week. Garlic in oil must be kept cold and not kept long. This is the one rule in this recipe that is not about flavour, and it is not negotiable. Keep it in the fridge, eat it within the week, and do not leave the jar on the counter because it looks pretty. It does look pretty. Fridge.
The oil will go cloudy and almost solid when chilled. That is the olive oil behaving normally, not a fault. It clears again within minutes at room temperature.
Notes
Peel more than you want to. Forty cloves sounds absurd and disappears alarmingly fast. Do it once, properly, while listening to something.
Use oil you would happily eat cold, because you are going to. This is not the moment for the cooking oil at the back of the cupboard.
Do not let it bubble. If the oil is fizzing enthusiastically the oven is too hot. You want the occasional lazy bubble and nothing more.
An hour of ignoring something, and you have transformed the cheapest ingredient in the shop.
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