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.
Thirty cloves of garlic go into this creamy side dish, adapted from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Volume 1 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1961). The cloves are first blanched whole, which enhances their sweetness, then used to make a rich béchamel sauce that’s stirred into mashed potatoes with cream and parsley. Get the recipe for Julia Child’s Garlic Mashed Potatoes »
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 »
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 »
This sauce adds plenty of kick to your dumplings without overpowering them. It’ll mellow as it sits in the refrigerator. Get the recipe for Raw Garlic Sauce »
This potent condiment has all the heat and sharp bite of pure raw alliums. A tiny amount goes a very (very) long way. Use the freshest garlic possible; the enzymes break down over time, and the sauce can discolor as it ages. Get the recipe for Forty Cloves of Garlic Sauce (Thoum) »
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 »
A rich soup heavy with garlic and shallots makes a hearty first course or light main dish. Serve it with plenty of crusty bread. Get the recipe for Creamy Garlic Soup »
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.
Set atop a sizzling steak, this restaurant classic melts luxuriously onto the meat. The recipe is adapted from Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Cooking (Random House, 1988). Get the recipe for Chez Panisse Garlic Butter »
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.
