The Roasted Garlic Experiment

The more you use garlic, the more you want to. As I'm sure you all know, Carolyn and I make a soup or stew on Sundays, and just about every soup starts with some minced garlic. Now, I'm the type of person who likes to know exactly how each of his ingredients works in the recipe as a whole. To that end, I'll snack on just about every ingredient in the recipe while I'm cooking (see, it's for the art, not because I'm hungry). And after you've been frying garlic, it starts to smell so good that you can't believe it won't also taste great. Bearing these two facts in mind, you can probably guess that I have, more than once, attempted to eat raw garlic. For those of you who have also taken this adventure, you know that it never turns out quite right. For those of you who haven't, eating raw garlic all by itself is a lot like eating wasabi paste all by itself: afterward, your sinuses are quite clear, but you still don't really know what it tastes like.

Anyway, Carolyn recently got tired of me going through this "it smells good - it should taste good - it doesn't taste good" cycle, and explained that while people really don't eat garlic raw, there is such a thing as roasted garlic. Why she kept this information from me for so long, I do not know. But to make a long story short, we tried making roasted garlic last night. On to this very short Recipe:

Prehead oven at 400
Chop the tops off of your heads of garlic, so they look like the picture below










Drizzle olive oil over head of garlic, use fingers to distribute so that the whole surface is covered. Oil will work its way down into the cloves.
Wrap the cloves in aluminum foil
Roast for ~30 minutes, or until garlic is soft and lightly browned

Remove from oven, let cool, and then you can just squeeze all the cloves out using pressure at the base
mash it with potatoes, mix it w/ butter, or spread it onto toast directly.

Initially, we ate several cloves alone with a little salt. Let me tell you, it is not what you expect. At least it was not what I expected. The smell of raw garlic is nothing like the flavor of roasted garlic. Some people describe roasted garlic as "nutty". That doesn't seem quite right to me, but since I can't do any better, we'll leave it at that. Also, the cloves become soft and spreadable, which is what makes them so ideal for a toast spread. On the whole, eating roasted garlic alone is not as offensive to the sinuses as raw, but it still leaves something to be desired.

Next we tried it spread on toast. This was about the same as eating it plain. Not bad, but definitely could be better.

Mashing the garlic into potatoes was a great success though. We cooked at Carolyn's apartment, and my potato masher wasn't there, so we ended up using a fork. It didn't really distribute the garlic cloves very well, since they couldn't be properly mashed up. Next time, we'll chop up the roasted garlic before mixing it in.

Final thoughts: roasted garlic would be best chopped up and mixed with butter for garlic butter or mixed directly into potatoes. Sadly, popping a piece of garlic into my mouth will just never give me the experience I expect from smelling it.