Eat the Garlic

Almost everything I cook begins the same way: Take out a head of garlic, separate the cloves, and begin peeling, trimming, and chopping. From there, ninety-five percent of the time, its job is to help accentuate the flavors of something else: vegetables, seafood, tofu, beans, pasta. Garlic is a key ingredient in the flavor bases for most world cuisines, and yet few people treat it as anything more than a spice, or an aromatic. That should change. Every recipe this week will destroy your breath and create a difficult predicament for your loved ones, who will be simultaneously impressed by your cooking and very turned off by your aromatics.

There are two main types of garlic: hard-neck and soft-neck. Hard-neck can typically only be found at farmers markets; like its name suggests, it has a long, hard stem, and is very expensive. It has fewer, but larger, cloves, and also has a slightly more intense, complex flavor. Soft-neck garlic is more common, more inexpensive, and more mild in flavor. Honestly, I tend to buy hard-neck garlic once in the springtime and think “huh tastes like garlic” and then go back to not spending like four dollars for a single head of garlic. (Oh, and there’s black garlic, which is a fermented garlic. It’s tasty but not a raw ingredient so we will ignore it today. Garlic scapes are the young necks of the hard-neck garlic variety, but they won’t be available for another few months so we’ll set them aside for another day.)

You should buy garlic by the head, which is the name for the entire bulb of garlic. The head contains several cloves, each wrapped in several layers of unbelievably irritating papery skin. When buying, give them a squeeze: the cloves should have no give at all, should be very firm and hard and have no brown spots on them. If they’re soft, they’ve gone bad. In terms of size, if you get a head with large cloves, you’ll be doing less peeling to get the same amount of garlic by weight.

I think people sometimes avoid garlic (and maybe cooking altogether!) because preparing it is sort of a pain. Here’s how to do it (garlic, anyway): Grab an entire head of garlic and hold it in both hands over the trash can. Using your thumbs, push the skin from the stem downwards; lots of the drier outer layers should fly off into the garbage. When it seems like you’ve gotten all the skin off that will come off by that method, break the head into cloves.

Place a clove flat-side down on a cutting board. Place the broad, flat side of a knife on the top of the clove, and smack it with the heel of your hand to lightly crush the clove. You don’t want to smash it to bits; the goal is to keep the clove roughly clove-shaped, but to crush it enough that the rest of the skin will easily slip off. Then trim off the root end, and it’s ready to use. (You can skip buying the pre-peeled cloves of garlic that come in plastic containers in the produce chiller at the grocery store; I think they taste a little artificial and stale. That said, that tub has its uses.)

If you’re mincing garlic, use a knife. Do not use a garlic press. Do NOT use a garlic press. They are all garbage, even the good ones. They squeeze all the juice out of the clove of garlic, which is just lost flavor, and there’s a huge amount of waste in the vast majority of presses; you know how you squeeze a garlic press and there’s, like, two-thirds of the clove left behind in the chamber? That’s real garlic that you’re wasting. Use a knife. If you think your knife skills are so bad that it takes forever to mince garlic, here’s a solution: Keep using the god damn knife until you’re good with it. You eat food three, maybe four times a day. Why do you think being good with a knife is a skill that you don’t need?

Anyway. Garlic is extremely strong in its raw form, spicy and aggressive, which has its uses, but they are few, to be honest. The longer you cook garlic, the more mild it becomes, and long and slow cooking turns garlic into a mild enough flavor that it can be the star of the show. Here are some recipes for that!

Garlic Soup

Shopping list: Container of peeled garlic cloves, leeks, dried chile flakes, chicken stock, olive oil, eggs, bread, bay leaves, chives, lemon

This is one of those times when buying pre-peeled garlic is fine; you’re using so much garlic that I can’t in good conscience demand that anyone actually peel them all. (I mean, I could, but.) Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees. In a small baking tray — a Pyrex is perfect for this — toss in about forty-five or fifty cloves of garlic (I know!) and cover in olive oil. This will take a lot of olive oil. That’s okay. Put it in the oven and roast until the cloves are completely soft, about forty-five minutes. Using a spider, strain out the garlic cloves, reserving the oil; that oil is GOLD, you will use some of it later in this recipe but the rest of it you should keep in a bottle for pouring over pastas or breads or pretty much anything else.

Slice your bread into crouton-sized cubes. Throw them in a big bowl and drizzle some garlic oil over them while tossing. Then lay them out on a baking sheet, making sure they have space between them, and put them in the oven at 350 for maybe twenty minutes, until crispy and croutoned.

In a large soup pot or dutch oven over low heat, pour in a touch of the garlic oil and saute a chopped leek and a pinch of chile flakes. When soft, add in all your roasted garlic and pour in enough chicken stock to cover. Heat for a little while to let the flavors meld, then blend; an immersion blender is best for this. Throw in a couple bay leaves, cover, and cook for another thirty minutes or so. Season to taste with salt and a squeeze of lemon.

Poach an egg or two.

To serve: Pick out the bay leaves and discard. Pour soup into a bowl. Top with a poached egg, some chopped chives, and some croutons. (Note: some people add heavy cream to this. I do not. Fuck heavy cream. Some other people thicken it with a raw beaten egg in the style of an avgolemono. I have never tried this but it seems like a good idea. If you try it, let me know how it goes.)

Garlic Chips

Shopping list: Garlic, olive oil, salt if you’re a heathen and don’t have any salt?

Peel a whole mess of garlic. Like a whole head’s worth. Slice off the root end and then slice them into thin circles (or ovals, I guess? Garlic isn’t a perfect cylinder). Put a pan over low heat and pour in a bunch of olive oil. Toss in all the garlic slices and watch them VERY. CAREFULLY. They will burn quickly. When they’re golden brown and a little crispy, they’re done. Remove (reserving the oil, which, again, is delicious) and let them drain on a paper towel for a minute or two. Use them pretty much anywhere you’d use croutons or bacon bits or dried chile flakes: in salads or popcorn, on soups or pizza or meats, if you eat meats, why not.

Very Good Spicy Garlic Bread

Shopping list: Garlic, aluminum foil, olive oil, butter, a baguette, fresh serrano or jalapeño chile, dried oregano

First step: roast some garlic. Pre-heat your oven to 350. Take a whole head of garlic and slice off the stem. This is hard to explain? Like, you want to slice off the top of each clove of garlic but keep all the cloves attached to the root end. It should look like this. Tear off a square of aluminum foil and set the head of garlic right in the middle of it. Then kind of gather up the foil around the garlic, making a little container for it. When it looks like this, pour in a glug of olive oil over the cut side, then continue to gather up the excess foil and completely encase the garlic. (I usually finish with a nice twist of the foil on top, like a replacement stem for the garlic that can also be used as a handle.) Stick the garlic right on the oven rack, don’t bother with a tray. Roast for about forty-five minutes or until soft.

When it’s done, each individual clove of garlic will be, like, encased in its oily little paper shell. Pop each of them out, and put in a bowl with some room-temp butter; the garlic to butter ratio should be about 3:2. Mash the butter and garlic together and sprinkle in some dried oregano, forming a kind of gross-looking paste.

Slice your baguette in half length-wise. I mean, slice it however you want. I don’t really care. I do it lengthwise. Spread your roasted-garlic butter on it like you’d spread cream cheese on a bagel. Chop up your chile, discarding the seeds, really finely, and sprinkle some chiles over the top. Sprinkle some salt over the top too. Bake at 400 degrees for maybe ten minutes, until the bread is crispy and your house smells incredible. Top with garlic chips, if desired.

I won’t argue that it’s not a pain to prepare garlic, even if you are an asshole who cooks fairly often and insists as a result that he has some kind of expertise on the subject. It’s kind of a pain. But, like, it’s garlic? It’s so delicious that even if it was harder to prepare than it is, I’d keep doubling and tripling the amount of garlic every recipe calls for. And so it is worth the toxic deathbreath to embrace garlic and make it the star of the show. But maybe wait until you’re very comfortable with your significant other before whipping out a garlic soup.

Photo by Isabel Eyre