The Key to the Best Garlic Bread Is One Unexpected Ingredient

I love garlic bread. Who doesn’t? It’s the perfect accompaniment to a red sauce pasta and makes a lovely bonus to a bowl of soup. Have you ever sat down to a green salad and had a big hunk of garlic bread next to it? Perfection. Garlic bread takes an already good meal and makes you feel like you’re getting something extra special. 

All that said, it’s pretty disappointing when the garlic bread in question isn’t that great. It seems like garlic bread being good is a given (it’s just garlic and butter on bread, right?) But truly good garlic bread is a marriage of flavors — garlic, heat, herbs, butter, salt — that need to be in balance with one another to make the kind of harmonious toasty deliciousness I have in my mind’s eye. 

I typically don’t use a recipe when making garlic bread, opting instead to mix ingredients with softened butter by eye. Sometimes the bread turns out great, and sometimes not so much. That was until I started adding an umami-packed pantry ingredient to the mix — anchovies!

I know anchovies can be a bit polarizing. They’ve got a pungent, borderline overpowering funky flavor … but that’s exactly what makes them perfect for this. The best garlic bread manages to balance out the very strong flavor of garlic with the creaminess of butter, the freshness of herbs, and the heat of chiles. Some even get a bump of umami from Parmesan cheese. 

Anchovies are a great foil for garlic at the same level of intensity but with a complementary flavor of salty, punchy umami. When added sparingly, the anchovy flavor almost disappears into the butter mixture, enhancing it in that way that makes you say, “Wow, this is amazing!” without being able to pinpoint why.

• A little goes a long way. Don’t overdo it. Anchovies are small but mighty.  I usually use 1 anchovy in the butter mixture meant for a full loaf of bread (about 8 tablespoons of butter).
• Rinse the anchovy. Rinsing anchovies and patting them dry gets rid of any extra oil left on the surface and mellows their flavor a bit.
• Chop finely. You don’t want big chunks of anchovy in the butter, so take the time to chop the anchovy as finely as possible so it can truly disappear into the butter. A food processor is also great for this task, you can throw all the garlic ingredients in and buzz away until they’re well incorporated. Or you could always skip chopping altogether and use 1/2 teaspoon anchovy paste instead.