Roasted garlic, fresh herbs in olive oil

Garlic – how to preserve it

Garlic – how to preserve it for all those dishes you love.

Garlic is an ingredient in so many dishes. There’s nothing better than using locally grown produce rather than the more tasteless imported (and very boring white) garlic that seems to lack the sweetness and depth of flavour.

I source my garlic from a local producer who grows the most amazing organic garlic and heirloom tomatoes. Look around for your own local producer rather than buy the less desirable and less tasty examples imported cheaply.

https://www.tasmaniannaturalgarlicandtomatoes.com.au/

 

Ingredients:

20 heads of garlic, cloves separated but not peeled

1 litre of olive oil

4 long stems of thyme

4 long stems of rosemary

Any size jars you want, but not too small, otherwise you lose the value of the herbs and roasted garlic infusing the oil. I used 120 – 150ml jars with screw top lids. Remember to sterilise them before you load them up with the ingredients!

Roasting the individual cloves lightly gives it a slightly sweeter flavour and less of the bitterness that people often dont like with the raw version(the usual culprit when people say they wont eat garlic!)

Steps to Success

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees C. Line a roasting tray with baking paper and spread the cloves out in one layer. Pop into the oven for 20 minutes – no longer or the smaller cloves will go too mushy. Take them out and let them cool so that you can handle them to peel the skin off.

Peel them, load up the jars, putting sections of the herbs in when the jar is about half full so that it winds around all the cloves. Fill to nearly the top and then pour over your olive oil, making sure the last clove is covered and sealed from the air. Put on the lid tightly and label with a date.

They keep in the pantry for about 6 months, but usually you’ve used them by then because they are so easy to spread on bread, smooth over a steak or throw in a casserole.