Thank you, Michael Psilakis. I love the garlic.

I recently got lost-ish in the library, found myself toddling down the cookbook aisle, and wound up checking out How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking (ISBN: 9780316041218).  I love this book.  I want to cook just about everything.  I'll probably buy it sooner or later.  But in the meantime, I chose two recipes that sounded too good to pass up: Garlic Confit and Chickpea Confit.  This blog will for the garlic confit; chickpeas will get their own.

The writer, Michael Psilakis,  said in the intro for the garlic confit recipe that the reader would thank him for that recipe, "if nothing else in this book."  He was right!  So as I said in the title, thanks, Mr. Psilakis.

Confit is a traditional preservation method in which the item you are preserving is slow-cooked in oil.  It works because the oil keeps out water and makes it difficult for bacteria to grow.  So the trick here is that you want everything to be as dry as possible, and you want to have a bit of extra oil.  Because we live in the 21st century, refrigeration adds even more shelf-life to confit, so the recipe uses a blend of olive oil and canola oil.  Olive oil for flavor; canola to keep it clear and fluid in the cold.

Garlic Confit
3 C garlic cloves, peeled
2 dried bay leaves
10 sprigs fresh thyme
1 Tbsp Kosher salt (skimpy Tbsp)
1/2 Tbsp Pepper
1 C olive oil
1 C canola oil

Preheat your oven to 350˚F.  Put the garlic cloves in a heavy, oven-safe pan.  Add the bay leaves, thyme, salt, and pepper.  Cover the whole lot with oil, cover, and pop in the oven for an hour and 15 minutes, until it is tender and golden.  Pull it out and cool it to room temperature (approximately).

While the confit is cooling, sterilize a jar.  To do this, place it in a pot of water so that the water is able to flow in and out of it, and bring it to a boil.  After a couple minutes of boiling, carefully remove the jar from the water (and pour out the water), and place it upside-down on clean, dry paper towels.  Allow to dry completely, and DO NOT touch the inside.

When the confit is cooled, transfer it into the jar.  I had to use a spoon (which I sterilized the same way I sterilized the jar).  Cover the surface with a piece of plastic wrap (don't touch the oil!), and place the lid on the jar.  You don't need the confit to be perfectly room temperature, just cool enough to not shatter the jar.  The less time you spend cooling it, the less time conditions are good for bacterial growth.  Once you've to it in the jar, you can let it continue to cool.  You can place it in a cold-water bath to cool quickly.  Then put it in the fridge.  According to Mr. Psilakis, they should last at least 3 weeks in the fridge, as long as you aren't sticking your fingers in or anything.

The hardest part of this is that is time-consuming.  I spent close to 2 hours peeling garlic.  I set up a little peeling station, with a bowl for peel, a bowl for peeled cloves, and a bowl of whole heads of garlic, put on a show I liked, and did my best to enjoy it. 

The best part of cooking this (besides eating; I'll get to that) was that my whole house smelled like garlic.  In a really pleasant, Italian-restaurant-y kind of way.  It isn't like raw garlic.  

The flavor is amazing!  I love it.  This is garlic at its finest.  I was able to eat a whole clove of it.  It was almost sweet, without being caramelized.  It didn't sting or even give me bad breath.  And the oil!  Oh, I LOVE the oil.  I've been cooking just about everything with this oil-- popcorn, meat, veggies.  I drizzled it over a tomato.  BEST DANG TOMATO I have ever eaten!  Worth all the time an effort I put into it.  Hands down.