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Roasted Garlic

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Makes 2 heads 1x

Time about 1 hour, largely unattended

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Ingredients

  • 2 whole heads garlic
  • 2 tablespoons or more olive oil
  • Salt

Instructions

1. Heat the oven to 375°F. Without getting too fussy or breaking the head apart, remove as much of the papery coating from the garlic as you can. Cut the top pointy part off each head to expose a bit of each clove.

2. Film a small baking dish with a little oil and add the garlic, cut side up. Drizzle with more oil and sprinkle with salt. Cover with foil and bake until the garlic is soft (you’ll be able to pierce it easily with a skewer or thin- bladed knife), 40 minutes or longer. Use right away or refrigerate, covered, for up to several days.

— Recipe from How to Cook Everything: Completely Revised Twentieth Anniversary Edition

Recipe variations

Faster Roasted Garlic
If you’re in a hurry: Break the heads into individual cloves, but do not peel them. Spread them in a pan, sprinkle with salt, and drizzle with oil. Bake, shaking the pan occasionally, until tender, 20 to 30 minutes.

8 Ways to Use Roasted Garlic
You could start and end like this: Spread it on bread and eat. But roasted garlic is so useful there’s no reason to stop there.

  1. Stir into any cooked sauce or soup in which you’d use garlic, usually toward the end of cooking.
  2. Spread on any pizza before adding other ingredients.
  3. Add to any vegetable purée or mashed potatoes.
  4. Add to Vinaigrette, mayonnaise, traditional pesto, compound butter, gravy, or almost any other sauce.
  5. Add to cooked grain or legume dishes.
  6. Toss with cooked vegetables.
  7. Mash with olive oil or softened butter and spread on cooked meat, poultry, or hearty bread.
  8. Mix with olive oil and butter and toss with hot pasta, using a little of the cooking water to make a sauce. Add chopped parsley, lots of black pepper, and some grated pecorino Romano to put it over the top.