Bouchon’s Garlic Confit

Welcome to another installment of Thomas Keller’s Building Block. On the agenda today is a demonstration on making Garlic Confit. *chuckle*

As you may know, confit is the method of slow cooking and storing an ingredient in oil, such as duck confit. Garlic confit is an essential element in the Bouchon kitchen and is used throughout many of the recipes. While the process is not complicated, it does require some time so I make a big batch and store it in the fridge so I always have it on hand. To put it into perspective, his recipes often require 20+ cloves at a time!

Garlic is without a doubt one of the most popular ingredients and flavors utilized in cuisines all around the world. As with mangoes, garlic is one thing I’m also obsessed with but thankfully, it’s available year round. Garlic chips is my most recent favorite. Proper preparation is essential in order for garlic to fully enhance the dish. Otherwise, it can sometimes end up too sharp, bitter, or bland.

Before encountering this Garlic Confit recipe, I used to make roasted garlic often and would pop a couple caramelized cloves into my mouth before incorporating the rest into my dish. While I love the sweet, nutty flavor and its creamy texture, it can be tedious when trying to ease them out of the bulb without breaking them. Often times, they came out too soft and disintegrated into the dish. These problems are solved by making Garlic Confit instead and you also get garlic infused oil as a bonus!

Ingredients

Peeled garlic cloves
Canola oil

Directions

I find garlic cloves easier to peel if I cut the root ends off first since it needs to be trimmed off anyways. A simpler solution is to buy pre-peeled garlic cloves at the Asian supermarket. I bought a tubful for $2.00 at a Korean supermarket, which is even cheaper than buying whole bulbs. How do they do it?!

Place the cloves into a saucepan and submerge them in oil by 1 inch. Turn the burner on to medium-low heat. Keller instructs to place the saucepan over a diffuser but since I don’t have one, I placed the saucepan over a sauté pan to evenly distribute the heat.

Set your timer to 40 minutes and check on it every 5 minutes and give it a gentle stir. Adjust the heat so you only see tiny bubbles rise from the cloves. It should not be steaming or sizzling and the garlic cloves should remain white. It should, however, make your whole place smell like a cozy bistro. *breathes in twice as hard*

At around 40 minutes or when the garlic cloves are tender, remove them from the heat and store them in the oil for up to a month. Smear them over a toasted baguette with some anchovies for a quick and smelly snack.

I added these soft, juicy cloves in abundance to some Bouchon recipes that I will share soon, such as the slurp-worthy Clams Marinières with Soffritto and a spring-inspired Lentil Soup, so stay tuned!