Roast Garlic Recipe

When you have beautiful garlic and you want to showcase it, make roasted garlic!

Compared to raw garlic's sharp bite, roasted garlic is milder and nuttier. Roasting caramelizes garlic's natural sugars during the roast, making it noticeably sweeter. The texture becomes soft and spreadable, almost buttery.

If you are featuring roasted garlic in your meal, consider having one whole bulb per person. If it will be an ingredient in a dish like mashed potatoes, a single large bulb may be enough.

Delicious ways to use roasted garlic are:

• as a spread directly on bread

• mixed with soft butter or olive oil to dip bread in

• in mashed potatoes

• in hummus or guacamole

• make a dip by adding it to sour cream, cream cheese, or mayonnaise

• mashed and stirred with olive oil into steamed veggies

• mashed and stirred with mayonnaise and mustard into chicken salad or potato salad

• mix it into ground meat for burgers or meatloaf

• just about anywhere you would use regular garlic, roasted garlic would be awesome!

Making roast garlic is easy:

1. Remove most of the outer papery wrappers, leaving just one or two layers. Trim off the root beard.

2. Cut the top off of each bulb, exposing the upper portions of each clove.

3. Place each bulb on a square of parchment paper. (I recommend avoiding aluminum foil to minimize your exposure to heavy metals.)

4. Sprinkle a pinch of salt over the cut surface of each bulb, then drizzle it with olive oil.

5. Fold the parchment paper up around the bulb, twisting the corners of the paper together to create a neat little packet.

You can create a packet with all the cut off tops together. They will cook faster than the bigger bulbs, so take that packet out sooner than the rest.

6. Place the garlic on a roasting pan and roast in a 400F oven for 30 - 40 minutes, or until the cut surface begins to brown.

Once the garlic has cooled down a bit, it is very easy to extract the soft cloves from their skins.

Tip: Burned garlic haas a bitter taste. If any corners get burnt, remove them.

During late summer and fall, I have beautiful hardneck garlic for sale at the farm and farmers' market!