5 Garlic Techniques That Will Up Your Game

I'm Lish Steiling. I'm a professional chef.

And today I'm gonna show you five ways to transform garlic.

We're talking garlic chips, roasted garlic, confit garlic,

garlic cream, and garlic butter.

This is Transforming Garlic 101.

Garlic chips are basically thinly sliced cloves of garlic

that you fry in a little bit of olive oil or avocado oil,

season it with a little bit of salt,

and what you end up with is kind of like garlic candy.

Let's say you're at a grocery store.

What exactly are you looking for in a good bulb of garlic?

You want it to be firm and tight.

You don't want it to be kind of soft, no dented marks.

Pre-peeled garlic, just don't do it.

It takes five to 10 seconds to peel a clove of garlic

and it makes a world of difference in a dish.

You avoid any accurate flavor, you avoid any sourness,

you avoid a stronger flavor.

Fresh is your friend.

First things first, we get our pan warming.

Peel the head of garlic here.

Pulling off a couple of these beautiful cloves here.

For the slicing.

I'm not actually smashing it.

I'm just giving it a little knock to loosen the skins.

And then I'm cutting off the root end

so that the skin comes off nice and easy.

We're just gonna slice them thin.

You can do this with a knife

or you could do it with a mandolin.

As we're slicing the garlic, it's bringing out the oils.

So you are definitely gonna smell that intense garlic smell.

But because we're leaving it in slices,

this'll give us a nice mild flavor

when we fry them in a little bit of oil.

If you cut it too thick, it might not crisp up as much,

or it might just take a little bit longer to cook.

Pan has been heating up.

I'm using olive oil here because I like the flavor of it.

You can absolutely use an avocado oil, a vegetable oil,

any kind of neutral oil.

I have about maybe a half an inch of oil in the pan,

just enough to coat

and give you a little girth at the bottom.

The way that you can tell if it's hot

is, first of all, it should move freely in the pan.

You can kind of see ripples that where it dances.

You can test it though by adding one little chip in there

and you can see it fries up.

We'll probably do it just a couple at a time.

You can lower them in with a spoon

if you don't feel comfortable

dropping them in with your fingers.

Keep them moving.

If it seems to be bubbling too much, turn down the heat.

If it doesn't seem to be bubbling enough, turn it up.

These chips could burn relatively easily

and they go from sweet to bitter pretty quickly.

Once they start browning on the edges,

that's when you really have to pay attention

'cause that's when it can go from brown to bad very quickly.

So as soon as they have that whisper of golden brown,

we start to spoon them out here.

This is what you're looking for.

You're looking for this even brown throughout, crispy edges.

You can kind of see through it, it's really pretty.

And

garlic candy.

So this one is slightly underdone.

It would still be very enjoyable,

but it's not gonna be as crispy.

That's your golden brown.

The difference is slight, but it's there.

This one is crispy all the way through.

This one still has just a whisper of softness in it.

This guy is too far.

It's gonna be crispy, but it's gonna leave you

with a kind of tannic coating on your tongue.

When in doubt, pull it out early

versus leaving it in too long.

Crispy garlic chips are a great addition

to salad, to pasta, to almost anything.

It adds a little bit of crunch,

it's a little earthy sweetness.

Garlic chips are relatively simple to prepare.

It just takes a little time, patience,

and don't forget, awareness.

Roasted garlic is

one of the easiest ways to transform garlic.

So we have our whole head of garlic,

cut off the top third of the head here.

And this surface area is gonna brown up nicely.

Everything else is gonna kind of steam and roast in its skin

and get super soft and delicious.

I have a little bit of aluminum foil here.

Plop this head of garlic on the foil.

Give it a good amount of olive oil.

Season it with a good amount of salt.

Seal it up like you would your deli sandwich.

Pop it in a 400 degree oven for about 50 minutes

until it's super soft and sexy.

It's been about 50 minutes.

Ooh, she looks pretty. Soft.

Yes, and look, oh, the garlic magic that happens.

You can see it's how easily it comes out of there.

Roasted garlic is another versatile way of preparing garlic

that transforms any dish.

The softness of roasted garlic in the sweet umami

meld so easily into sauces, soups, stews, mayonnaise,

or even just smeared on toast

to keep you healthy all winter long.

The method of confiting anything

is basically cooking something in fat and cooking it slowly.

This method, we're gonna carefully peel

an entire head of garlic.

Taking off the outer papers here.

Pull apart all these

what will become our little jewels of confit garlic.

It's similar in flavor to roasting,

but you're gonna get a little bit more sweetness out of it

because you're kind of caramelizing the entire

clove of garlic, like all the way around.

Confit was originally used to preserve meats, vegetables.

So by confiting the garlic,

this will stay in your refrigerator for two, three weeks,

so you can freeze it for even longer.

A little secret, just keep a damp towel down by your board

because your fingers tend to get sticky

as you're peeling the garlic,

which makes then everything stick to your fingers

instead of dropping down to the board.

So we have our little gems of garlic here.

I'm just gonna put these in a small sauce pan

and the key to confit, fat.

So I'm gonna cover these in oil.

Now you might say, Lish, that's a lot of oil,

but you can use this oil after you've confited them.

You want enough oil to cover the garlic cloves.

I'm just using a little bit of thyme here.

You can use thyme, you can use rosemary,

if you like chili flakes.

But with this one,

we want it to focus on the flavor of the garlic

and transforming that garlic.

Low and slow.

Just tiny bubbles around the garlic cloves,

that's what we're looking for.

So this is pretty much where we want it to stay

for the full amount of time that it's gonna cook.

You can see there's little bubbles

going around those garlic cloves, nothing too rapid.

So we're gonna let this go

for anywhere from maybe 40 minutes to an hour.

So these gems have been going

for about 55 minutes right now,

and it's looking like they're pretty perfect.

You know what's ready when it's soft.

And that light golden brown, that's just gorgeous, right?

So this I would now wanna cool off

and then store in the refrigerator at least 24 hours

just to let those flavors mingle.

And then both the oil and the garlic are ready to use.

So the little jewels of garlic, when you confit them,

actually add a little garnish to the dish.

It adds a silky texture

to something that might be crispy like romaine lettuce.

And then the oil itself

that you can use to saute broccoli rob or other vegetables,

it's just delicious.

Garlic cream is really just heavy cream that's been simmered

with some peeled and smashed garlic.

So it has that essence of garlic.

Again, we start with the head of garlic.

We're just gonna break it up into cloves.

We're gonna use about 12 of them.

Really, the focus here is the cream.

So smashing the garlic brings out the oils

and opens up all the crevices

so that the flavor infuses into the heavy cream.

And I just wanna add about a cup of cream or so

over medium heat for now, just to bring it up to a simmer.

And we're gonna season it with a few cracks of black pepper

and a little sprinkling of salt.

So you wanna just bring it to a simmer again

until it kind of bubbles and maintains that light bubble.

Of note, when infusing your cream with garlic,

stand by so that you can control the heat

and stop it from boiling over.

Our cream has come to a simmer.

Now I've reduced the heat

so that there is just a little bit of bubbling happening.

And I'm just gonna let it go for about 45 minutes or so

until the garlic is soft

and the cream is super flavorful with that garlic flavor.

My cream mixture has been going for about 45 minutes now.

So you can tell that this cream mixture is ready

because the cream has reduced, the garlic is tender,

it's nice and thick.

Look at how that coats the back of a spoon, huh?

You want to incorporate that garlic,

could puree it with an immersion blunder

or you could strain it out

and just use the cream as a beautiful garnish.

So either way, it's gonna be delicious.

I mean, what's better than garlicy mashed potatoes

where you use the cream,

maybe you've pureed the garlic into it

so it has that intense garlic flavor drizzle over the top.

No one's ever mad at that, right?

And then it goes great as a garnish for soup.

I mean, tomato soup seems like a natural pairing, right?

And it makes it beautiful.

It makes it seem like it came from a restaurant.

The versatility of garlic cream is legit.

We are onto garlic butter.

Let's go. Huh?

I'm gonna do about 10 cloves of garlic.

So in this case, it's great to smash the garlic

because I'm gonna chop it finely.

And that brings out all the oils anyway,

so this is just kind of giving them a headstart.

I'm gonna be taking the edge off

by sauteing it in a little bit of butter,

just so that the garlic kind of has a chance to relax

and bring out some of the underlying flavors of the garlic

versus just raw garlic.

I'm still removing the little root ends

because, again, they're just not very palatable.

We wanna go relatively fine

because the garlic should be distributed evenly

in the butter.

You don't really wanna bite down on big chunks of garlic.

Technically, you could do this in a mini food prep.

Less dishes this way.

I'm going to heat up a small saute pan,

get that going over medium heat.

Melt about two tablespoons of unsalted butter.

My butter is melted, so in goes my garlic.

I like to keep this at about a medium heat

just so I don't brown the butter

and the garlic cooks nice and slow.

I am going for a little whisper of color on the garlic,

but I don't want that to happen too quickly.

So medium is kind of the safe spot.

Nice amount of salt.

You can see there are bubbles all around the garlic,

which is a good thing, you want even cooking.

You want to know that that pan is hot,

that the garlic is mellowing.

And this comes together in two or three minutes.

Keep an eye on it.

Once you see dark brown happening,

or maybe the butter brown too quickly,

that's your sign

that you need to pull it off the heat pretty quick.

But right now, I'm starting to smell the shift in color.

So I'm gonna pull this off,

let the bubble subside a little bit and see where I'm at.

Oh, that looks about right.

There are whispers of golden in the garlic,

so I am going to stop this right here

and let it cool a little bit.

You don't wanna go directly from super hot

into room temperature butter,

'cause chances are you're gonna melt the butter

that's at room temperature.

Our garlic mixture has cooled.

We can see that whisper of golden. The hue has changed.

I love that.

Add that to a bowl.

I have room temperature butter here that is unsalted butter

so that we can control the seasoning entirely.

It totals an entire stick of butter,

so that's easy to remember.

So good.

Don't you just wanna smear it on a piece of Shabbat bread

and top it with cheese and dive in.

One last thing to do, taste, taste, taste.

A little more salt.

Now consider this your base.

You could add some fresh thyme, some chopped rosemary,

a little parsley, lemon zest, calabrian chili paste,

fennel pollen,

a little tract coriander seed would be delicious.

Look at that.

I have my garlic butter,

and you can store it just like this.

Put a little cling foam over the top,

throw it in your refrigerator.

It'll keep for probably about a week, week and a half.

Garlic butter is delicious on a steak, on a piece of fish,

on vegetables,

and it means that cheesy garlic bread

is only a few minutes away.

The versatility of garlic is real, clearly.

I mean, you can make it crispy, you can make it creamy,

you can make it soft, you can make it luxurious.

There's so many different ways to transform garlic,

where it too can become the star of the dish.