How to Make Roasted Garlic

This simple preparation of roasting whole heads of garlic gives you one of the best ingredients for seasoning food. Through slow roasting, you’ll develop mellow, sweet flavours as opposed to the potent flavours of raw garlic. When using roast garlic as a seasoning, you can give comforting, slow-cooked characteristics into your food with little effort. This valuable kitchen cheat will make your 30-minute meals taste like you’ve been slaving over a stove for hours!

Once the whole heads are roasted, the browned garlic cloves can be extracted with very little fuss. These tender golden morsels can easily be spread into the consistency of a puree and used to season a number of cooking preparations. In doing so, you’re adding complex layers of flavour. You’re imparting this comforting, slow-cooked characteristic to whatever you are cooking it with and this is what makes it so valuable. I like adding it to sauces, braises, soups, as well as adding it to flavour roasts and sauteed vegetables, pasta,grain-based dishes and vinaigrettes.

The steps for making this are simple and require very little hands-on work.

Ingredients

4 large heads of garlic
2 tablespoons of oliv oil
Salt to taste
4 sprigs of thyme
A large sheet of foil

Method

1. Preheat an oven to 170C.

2. Prepare a sheet of foil large enough to fold in half and still wrap around 4 cloves of garlic comfortably to create a sealed package.

3. Fold the large sheet in half to create a thicker layer of foil.

4. Remove any excess papery skin from the garlic and cut the top centimetre or so off of the garlic to reveal the cloves.

5. Drizzle well with olive oil and season with salt.

6. Optionally, add a few sprigs of thyme for more flavour.

7. Pinch the seams shut to create a foil pouch for the garlic to steam in and roast for 1 hour – 1.5 hours depending on how dark you want the garlic roasted.

8. Once cooked, allow to cool slightly before removing the cloves by squishing down at the root end of the head and removing any excess garlic skins.

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