Garlic-Steamed Manila Clams. Romulo Yanes
One of mankind’s oldest crops, garlic is also one of its most versatile. In its raw state, it brings fire to condiments and dishes such as ajo blanco, a cold, bracing Spanish soup; cooked, the heat mellows the acid in the cloves, lending it a sweetness that harmonizes beautifully with other ingredients. Here, 25 great ways to use it.
Triple Garlic Linguine
The pasta for this potent and luxurious dish is cooked in chile-spiked chicken stock and bolstered by three preparations of garlic: roasted, fried, and sauteed.
Roasted Garlic Ice Cream
Roasting garlic brings out its sweetness, so the flavors meld beautifully in this simple vanilla ice cream inspired by one served at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California.
Roasted Garlic Focaccia
When garlic cloves are chopped, the sulfur compounds and an enzyme called allinase, usually held separate within the clove, come into contact with one another. The collision generates the compound allicin, which gives garlic its pungency, and pyruvic acid, which is responsible for its spicy heat. But left intact, so that its volatile compounds don’t interact, garlic offers an entirely different character; roasting the cloves whole draws out their sweetness, yielding the sumptuous confit that adorns this pretty focaccia. Cook the focaccia on a pizza stone, which will give the bottom crust a delicious crunch.
This crisp-skinned bird is cooked in a generous amount of butter and served with a delectable pan sauce of garlic and cilantro. A small chicken can be substituted for the Cornish game hen.
Garlic Scape and Cannellini Bean Hummus
With a bright, fresh garlic flavor that’s like a cross between scallions and bulb garlic, garlic scapes—the curly green shoots of hard-neck garlic varieties—add a pungent bite to this hearty hummus made with cannellini beans. Serve it with fresh pita, crudités, or toasted baguette slices. See the recipe for Garlic Scape and Cannellini Bean Hummus »
Carbone’s Garlic Bread
In a breadbasket at Manhattan’s Carbone, we discovered the Platonic ideal of garlic bread. With roasted garlic butter made from freshly chopped cloves that are by turns sharp and mellow, heat from red chile flakes, and a bit of funk from parmesan, each crunchy bite of baguette, scattered with parsley and chives and bathed in olive oil, is fiercely flavorful and craveworthy.
Sopa de Ajo
Devised by Castillian shepherds seeking warmth on cold winter nights, sopa de ajo, or garlic soup, made with chicken stock, day-old bread, sinus-clearing hot paprika, and plenty of the stinking rose, is said to awaken dulled senses. Perhaps that’s why it’s also touted as a hangover cure. See the recipe for Sopa de Ajo »
