Cooks all over the world punctuate their food with garlic’s pungent kick and while a clove or two add delicate heat to any dish, sometimes the occasion calls for a heavier hand.
If you’re fending off vampires or a case of the sniffles, recently single, or otherwise throwing your inhibitions to the wind, read on for our 16 best garlic recipes.
Garlic Rye Croutons
Slathered in oil, baked until crisp, then tossed with a potent quantity of raw garlic, these rye croutons ride sidecar to every soup in Latvia. If you can’t get a loaf of rupjmaize, the sweet-sour Latvian bread, use the darkest loaf of rye bread you can find. Get the recipe for Garlic Rye Croutons »
Black (Aged) Garlic Stock
Also known as black garlic, aged garlic is the result of a Maillard reaction: Whole heads of garlic are slowly caramelized until the cloves turn black and tacky. Aged garlic is sweet like soft caramel and complex like tamarind. It is said to harness twice the antioxidants of cured garlic. Use this stock to add sweetness to a dish, to develop a marinade for meat, or (reduced) to build a pan sauce. Get the recipe for Black (Aged) Garlic Stock »
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.
Even More Handmade Food Gifts
See 8 more recipes for edible gifts, developed by Marisa McClellan of [Food in Jars, including hand-chopped garlic salt, homemade vanilla extract, pickled cranberries, and boiled cider syrup. Get the recipes »
Torshi Seer
For this sweet-tart Persian pickle, whole heads of garlic are fermented in a vinegar solution until the cloves are very soft.
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.
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.
