Garlic Season: Confit, Black Garlic & the Ultimate Dip

When garlic gets cheap, buy the big bag — this video turns it into a season’s worth of flavor through three techniques, each with its own follow-ons. Garlic confit poaches cloves in barely-bubbling butter for an hour, and the strained thyme-garlic butter immediately becomes steak butter and a miso marinade. Black garlic is the patience project: twenty double-wrapped heads spend four weeks at 60 °C while one slow Maillard reaction turns them dried-fruit sweet — then they star in a fried Parmesan sandwich spread, a two-garlic pasta and a mayo-thick aioli. And the ultimate garlic dip confits cloves with sesame in low olive oil before meeting cream cheese, leaving behind a jar of infused oil as a bonus. Seven recipes, three techniques, one humble ingredient — and every one starts with the same jar-shake peeling trick.

Recipes in this video

The fast track: an hour in barely-bubbling butter turns a bag of cheap cloves into confit — and its strained butter feeds the next two recipes.

The confit’s first dividend: chopped cloves rolled into their own thyme-garlic butter — steak night handled one slice at a time.

Confit round two: miso for the umami, mirin for the sweetness — and that sweetness is what builds a deep crust on grilled meat.

The patience project: a month at 60 °C turns the cheapest garlic of the year into restaurant-priced black garlic — the Parmesan sandwich spread is built right into the recipe.

Sweet up front, deep umami underneath — a handful of black cloves stirred in off the heat, clinging to every strand.

Half a head of black garlic in a mayo-thick emulsion — the potatoes are just the excuse.

The crowd-pleaser: garlic and sesame confited low and slow, mashed with cream cheese — and the strained oil is a second recipe hiding in the sieve.

Watch the full video