Homemade garlic confit has become my secret ingredient for adding a delicate umami flavor to salad dressings, pizza, scrambled eggs, and a myriad of other dishes. It’s also fabulous in hummus. Garlic confit is not simply roasted garlic, which is also wonderful. To make confit, garlic cloves are roasted while submerged in a bath of olive oil together with thyme branches and bay leaves. When the garlic cloves are roasted in olive oil, you not only create heavenly roasted garlic, you also end up with liquid gold: a jar of mellow roasted garlic oil that can be used in countless ways. I recently have been making all of my scrambled eggs with garlic confit oil, and it makes a killer salad dressing.
I generally buy whole heads of garlic, but since this recipe calls for a huge amount of garlic, this might be the time to buy a big tub of peeled garlic cloves from an international market.
My Secret Ingredient: Garlic Confit
Ingredients
- 1 pound peeled garlic cloves
- 12 thyme branches
- 3 bay leaves
- about 2 cups of olive oil
Instructions
- Heat the oven to 350F.
- Place the bay leaves in the bottom of a small baking dish. Arrange the thyme branches on top of the bay leaves. Then arrange the peeled garlic cloves on top of the thyme. Pour olive oil on top to cover, about 2 cups or so.
- Bake for 45-60 minutes, until the cloves are soft and starting to color. Let cool, the carefully decant into a jar. Keep it refrigerated.
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