Directions
This is a deliciously sweet and easy way to enjoy garlic and the roasted garlic recipe is so simple that I’m sure it will become the only way you eat garlic bread as well. Enjoy!
When I was a teenager I worked briefly in a pizza joint as a delivery driver. When there were no deliveries, I was assigned various jobs by our recently out of jail ‘Chef’, not that he was too busy to do so but he had to go hassle the waitresses and beg for bourbon from the bartender. One of the jobs that the ‘Chef’ used to get me to do in this classy place was to prep the garlic bread.
This job involved taking some anemic highly processed and cottony soft bread rolls and cutting them in half, dipping them face down about 1 centimeter into some dirty old vegetable oil that had 2 cloves of garlic sadly sunken on the bottom, then I would take chopped parsley and sprinkle it on the oily surface, fold the bread back together and wrap it in aluminium foil. Even though at that time I cared more about making a few bucks to fuel my pride and joy rust bucket of a car than I did food and cuisine, I knew that this was not food and that there must be a better way to make garlic bread.
It was not too many years later that I discovered the joy of eating proper roasted garlic bread. It’s the only way I eat garlic bread now and I have fortunately never touched a piece of oil soaked or butter smeared ‘Garlic Bread’ since.
How to Roast Garlic Video – Step-by-step instructions
Roasted Garlic Recipe:
- Preheat oven to 190 degrees Celsius or 370 degrees Fahrenheit
- Cut off the top ¼ of each bulb & discard
- Remove any loose excess skin
- Arrange the bulbs evenly in a pan or ovenproof dish
- Cover liberally with olive oil
- Place the pan into the oven and roast for approximately 10 minutes
- Remove the pan and pour some more oil on each bulb
- Return the pan to the oven and roast for a further 10 minutes
- Rotate the pan or re-arrange the garlic
- Baste again by spooning the oil in the base of the pan over each bulb
- Roast a further 15 minutes or until golden and the cloves are starting to rise out of the skin
- Set aside to cool thoroughly
- Once cooled, remove the garlic, strain the oil through a fine sieve and store for later use in dressings etc.
- To remove the cloves, simply squeeze the base of each bulb and they will come right out of their skin
Suggestion: Spread the cloves on a nice crusty bread like an Italian ciabatta. The cloves can also be used on antipasto platters, in your cooking and added to everything from pasta sauces to salads or you can mash them into a paste and use it as a spread or a condiment to meats and seafood. The options are limitless.
Note: Although the garlic is delicious and sweet, anymore than a few cloves will leave you quite thirsty, which of course is fine if you have plenty of Italian wine on hand.
