It turns out that something kind of magical happens when you take 20 cloves of garlic and slowly cook them down in olive oil. Last week Bon Appetit.com featured a recipe calling for — yes, you read that right — 20 cloves of garlic.
This was a recipe for Grilled Chicken Salad with Garlic Confit; the salad itself didn't so much catch my eye, but the method of making a garlic confit certainly did.
The recipe boasts "oil-poaching the garlic to make confit, which yields tender, sweet cloves and infused oil. Add the cloves to pan sauces, use the oil for drizzling, or purée them both into a dressing." It's quite literally the garlic that keeps on giving. And giving. I love the idea of having infused oils and drippings to add to fried rice, salad dressings, and omelettes. Or to spread generously on toasted leftover baguette or pizzas.
Read About the Method: Garlic Confit at Bon Appetit
Related: Fennel, Lemon and Garlic Confit
(Image: Flickr user Muffet licensed for use under Creative Commons)
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Aioli!
are there concerns for botulism when doing this?
I think botulism is an issue if you put raw cloves into oil and let them sit. I could be wrong though
I've made this before and it's a total snap! I actually swapped it at the East Bay Food Swap a month ago and swappers loved it!
I didn't use cloves, just vegetable oil and garlic cloves and the oil takes on a wonderful, mellow garlic flavor.
Most recipes say to refrigerate after cooling in glass jars to prevent any bacteria growing and it can stay in the fridge for months, but I usually leave mine in a cool pantry without any problems.
You can definitely peel your own garlic here too but many grocers (like Costco and most Korean markets) sell giant bags of already peeled garlic inexpensively - it's worth the time saver.
Happy confit-ing!
Eric Gower from Breakaway Cook also has a method for oil poaching the garlic that appears in cookstr. ---Uses 50 cloves and takes about 40 minutes but its foolproof.......
I do refrigerate mine and add a small amount of ascorbic acid--which I can't taste. Hopefully that mitigates the botulism risk.
Is this basically a bagna calda? God, I love that stuff, but the air quality in my apartment the next day sure does suffer.
I do this to make my garlic-infused oil for cooking, because I'm lazy about chopping garlic for a stir-fry and such. The whole poached garlic are get on crostini with a little goat cheese. Or added to and onion dip. It's pretty good in a caramelized onion tart.
Yum! Made this earlier this evening (followed the link and made the dressing/sauce from it, too, although for something other than a salad...). Very easy and tasty, and I don't seem to have contracted botulism... Had penne with celery polpette, roasted sunchoke, caramelized onions, and sauteed kale, then made the garlic dressing (1/2 cup garlic oil, 8 confit garlic cloves, 2tbs. mustard, and 2tbs red wine vinegar, although I reduced the vinegar amount...) and tossed everything together in it. And I fried the polpette in the garlic oil and chopped up the rest of the confit garlic and mixed it in with the dish. Very good, but a few too many cooking methods at once. I had to do each thing separate, which wasn't ideal.
I make 10 lbs of this twice a week at work. It's so, so easy.