Glorious garlic • by Anne Cori
Posted On: 07/01/2008 E-mail This To A Friend!

If there's one essential flavoring for making food taste savory and delicious, it must be garlic. But if you have only tasted the dried-out, often sprouted, soft-neck garlic from China, which is typically a year or so old by the time you buy it in the supermarket, you're missing out. The juiciness of fresh hard-neck garlic is a revelation, and now is the time to enjoy it.

Garlic is easy to grow in the St. Louis climate. Individual cloves are planted in October and harvest generally begins in July. Fresh local garlic is fragrant, delectably mild and lacks the bitterness of grocery store varieties. It is delicious roasted, sautéed or used in classic garlic-heavy recipes.

To roast garlic, I recommend peeling the whole head of garlic first. Some recipes call for roasting the garlic without peeling it, but the sticky skins are very hard to remove after cooking, plus it takes an hour to fully bake the whole heads. Place the cloves in a ramekin, cover them with plenty of olive oil or butter and bake at 325 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes. The roasted garlic, which is soft and mellow and buttery, can be added to mashed potatoes and salad dressings or just spread on bread. Use the leftover garlic-infused olive oil to sauté vegetables. (Be sure to keep any infused oil in the refrigerator and use it quickly; infused oils have a short shelf life.)

Sautéed garlic cooks very quickly and burns easily, so be sure to cook the garlic on medium heat – not high – and use plenty of fat to carry the garlic flavor. If a recipe calls for other aromatics like onions, sauté the onions first and then add the garlic so that it does not burn. Another way to cook garlic is to slowly caramelize the whole cloves in olive oil in a covered fry pan on low heat. The garlic then has a sweet, stick-to-your-teeth quality that is delicious on meat and potatoes.

For garlic-lovers, recipes like chicken baked with 40 cloves or shrimp scampi are dinner table regulars. A student once told me that my recipe for scampi must have a typo, since it should be "1 or 2 cloves of garlic," not 12 cloves. "Oh no," I replied, "the whole point of scampi is the intense flavor of garlic." To make scampi, I sauté a dozen smashed, whole cloves of garlic in lots of olive oil to infuse the flavor, then add shrimp, hot red pepper, white wine and butter, and serve it over pasta. When the cloves are left whole, the diner has the option of not eating them but still enjoying the flavor.

Raw garlic, while delicious, is powerful stuff and should be used in moderation; the garlic burn will easily overtake the other flavors in a dish. The raw garlic in any recipe can be substituted with gently sautéed or roasted garlic. Even then, perhaps garlic-lovers should only kiss other garlic-lovers.

There are endless uses for this essential aromatic. For a St. Louis summer day, try a refreshing and very flavorful Spanish garlic soup that is sometimes called white gazpacho. The color and texture of ajo blanco come from almonds and bread, but the flavor is the zing of raw garlic, accented with olive oil and sherry vinegar.

Anne Cori, a Certified Culinary Professional, has taught cooking classes for more than 15 years at Kitchen Conservatory.

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