Roasting Peeled Garlic

Roasted garlic is a must have staple in our home.  We use it in so many dishes to add an almost barely sweetness combined with a deep, rich garlic flavour.  It is nothing like fresh garlic!  I've roasted garlic in the oven, on the grill and in the countertop roaster will excellent results.  I've always just sliced the top of a head of garlic to barely expose the tops of the cloves then drizzled with olive oil and roasted as desired.  One of the grocery stores here is now selling 250 g packages of peeled garlic cloves for 97¢.  I bought another package yesterday then suddenly wondered if I could roast them.  I reasoned if it worked it would save considerable mess getting the roasted cloves out of the peeling later and there would be less of the delicious roasted garlic wasted.  The hopes were if it worked fine, I would do up a large batch of roasted garlic the first of the week.
 

The garlic cloves are peeled but I had to cut the root end.  I poured almost the entire contents of the package into a 7 c oven proof baking dish then drizzled with extra virgin olive oil.  I covered the dish with aluminum foil then set in the oven at 350ºF.  There was no need to pre-heat the oven.

I was quite hopeful this little experiment would work.  The peeled garlic was ultra simple to prepare, just snipping the stem end off of each clove.  I will be growing garlic in my new garden beds so this would be a great way to use them up.  I don't mind peeling garlic as that goes quick enough, it's the mess of getting the roasted garlic cloves out of the skins that would be nice to eliminate.

Oh my gosh, did the house ever smell yummy!  I just love the smell of garlic roasting.  It is such a tantalizing smell.  I roasted covered for 40 minutes total, stirring once half way through the roasting process.

The cloves caramelized nicely.  There were a couple of the smaller ones that were what I would consider over roasted.  They were a bit harder but that happens with garlic roasted in the traditional manner as well.   This really doesn't affect the final product other than adding extra flavour and the harder bits soften once the product is allowed to sit for a short period of time.  I like to let my roasted garlic sit for an hour or so before preparing it for storage.

Once the roasted garlic was ready, I spooned the garlic cloves into a smaller 2 cup bowl.  This left any extra oil in the baking bowl.  I mashed the cloves the set aside to cool before refrigerating.  The overall yield was about ¾ c of delicious roasted garlic with no muss or fuss.  It tasted just as good as garlic roasted the traditional way.

I'm very encouraged by this little experiment.  I am going shopping for garlic tomorrow to do a larger batch as well as canning a small batch of pickled garlic.  I would dearly love to can roasted garlic but can't because of the oil.  It does freeze nicely so after tomorrow my stocks will be replenished!

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