Saturday, January 15, 2011

Garlic night

Tonight I needed to use up a few of my 6 heads of CSA garlic, so I decided to make Julia Child's aïgo bouïdo and roasted garlic. As usual, click each title for links to the recipes.


This is a lovely, light, and creamy garlic soup. Even if you don't like garlic, you will probably find this surprisingly pleasant. As we love garlic, I enjoyed it heartily.

First, you peel and boil a whole head of garlic, separating the cloves first. (Julia recommends boiling the unpeeled garlic cloves to make peeling easier.) Then make a broth by boiling the peeled garlic with some thyme, fresh parsley, salt, pepper, cloves, olive oil, and a bay leaf.


When the broth is almost done, you make the egg yolk and olive oil mixture that helps to thicken the soup. This part is done in the same style as a homemade mayonnaise: beat the yolks by hand while you add the olive oil drip by drip. When you're done, it's thick, yellow, and creamy.


You then whisk in a little of the hot broth, then strain the rest of the broth into the yolk mixture. You just push the garlic & stuff through the strainer to make sure you get as much of it as possible.


Even for the yolk mixture, it was very light and creamy. There wasn't as much garlic flavor as I expected, but I don't think I got as much off the strainer as I could. Anyway this was an enjoyable winter soup. So that was one head of garlic down, and for three more...


Some friends suggested I roast some garlic, and let me tell you, this was amazing. I cannot believe I haven't been doing this for years.

Cut the top off of a garlic bulb, rub it in olive oil, then roast in aluminum foil for 45 min. at 350 degrees.


When they come out, you let them cool, then squeeze the cloves out of the paper.


You can do a lot of things with these little guys: spread them on crackers (which I did), put them in pasta, put them on salad, or...

Squish them into room temperature butter for roasted garlic butter. Amazing.


I was very happy to make this, and I can't wait to spread it on crackers, sandwiches, steak, pasta - pretty much anything I can think of. I can tell I'll be making a lot of roasted garlic in the future.

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