Roasted Garlic Revisited

Roasted garlic is a true culinary delight! The problem with roasting garlic is it takes a long time for a little bit. For that reason I like to roast up a lot of garlic at one time then freeze it for later use. I posted my method for making roasted garlic on the grill. When we were at Sam's Club I picked up a large sleeve of garlic so decided to roast garlic except the grill is under a good foot of snow. I decided to use the countertop roaster. Why? My oven costs 27.6¢ per hour to operate whereas the countertop roaster costs 9¢ per hour. Now this isn't a lot of money but it does add to the overall costs.

Roasting

I only needed the countertop oven roaster, a large sleeve of garlic and extra virgin olive oil (1). I had 19 large heads of garlic but only 18 would fit in the roaster pan. I removed the excess skin and cut across the heads to reveal part of the garlic cloves (2). The tips of garlic cloves were saved for another use so as to not waste while the heads were drizzled with extra virgin olive oil. The roaster was set to 200ºF then left alone to roast until the house smelled of wonderful garlic and the cloves were a golden carmelized colour (3). The only way I know of being able to get the luscious roasted golden garlic nuggets (4) out of the skins is to use your fingers. A bit of pressure or a little persuasion will have those beauties right in the bowl ready for freezing.

Freezing

Once I had all of the roasted garlic cloves into the blow I washed my hands well then was on to mashing them up. The cloves mash nicely. Then I spooned the roasted garlic mash into a mini 1" cupcake tin for freezing (5). This gave me a 1" diameter by ½" high or about 1½ tbsp of roasted garlic. This is just the perfect size for adding into soups or stews. If you haven't had potato soup with roasted garlic you seriously do not know what you have been missing! Once the garlic was frozen I transfered the small pucks into two freezer bags. I like using zipper style bags for this purpose but what I do to protect the garlic is to pack with a soft vacuum until frozen then place that bag inside a freezer vacuum bag and vacuum seal. This protects the flavour and prevents any freezer burn.