It’s from Cook’s Country (a cooking show on PBS in the US). The cook used a technique to get the skins off the cloves of garlic by shaking them in a bowl. I used 3 heads of garlic, and I couldn’t get this to work. I used a ton of manual labor instead to get the skins off.
I used pork fat instead of the vegetable oil. Mine was super hard in the fridge, so it must have a higher percentage of saturated fat.
I also only had time for about a 4 hour rest before cooking, though I do think 24 hours is better.
Seriously? Only 40 cloves? How small is the roast?
Squeezing them gently by the tips compresses them enough to crack the papery “shell.” Stick a finger under the crack, and it the skin usually comes completely off. And if it doesn’t, it’s pretty manageable.
P.S.–I checked out the farm store today–looking good! Bought some tongue, liver, and oxtail.
Bob, I’ve tried methods to get the skin off, too. The shaking-in-a-bowl - I don’t know, it seems to work fairly well with larger, heavier cloves that will really slam against the bowl and bruise the skin enough to change things. Also have done the blanching or parboiling, just put the cloves in boiling water for a minute or some small amount of time. Again, it works okay for some of the cloves…
But still end up cutting the ends off the cloves and trying to peel them with my fingers after that, for so many. Bottom line for me is that buying peeled garlic is the best way to go. And stuffing a whole bunch of garlic inito a pork loin is excellent.
When you put anything in the oven, throw in some garlic, shell on. It will peel easily, and turn brown and soft, and have a very mellow sweet flavor. I used to do this a lot.
@PaulL The new store is getting there, although it was relatively empty when I was there. I told them the old store used to have things that were very hard to find elsewhere, like seaweed. (Forgot to tell them about the chocolate, though. They had high-quality 80+ percent chunks of chocolate.)
I did not see the tongue or liver, but I only spent a short time there, as I had my pup at Dogtopia. I was trying to get in and out and then go get the pup.
@OldDoug This was a simple “throw the garlic into a pan on the side of the roast, then toss into the oven” recipe. The recipe does recommend tenting the roast after it’s out of the oven, and then cooking the garlic more, which I did do. Some of the larger cloves were not cooked well.
In the show, they recommended “fresh” garlic, saying that the peeled stuff isn’t as good when garlic is the star of the show. I’m not sure about that, but I tend to follow recipes exactly on the first time.
Doesn’t matter, it’s still 40 more cloves than ideal if you ask me
I did like cloves but mostly raw… Then carnivore came and I stopped eating cloves, it just was weird roasted along with meat… (Almost all my clove eating involved toasts anyway, not like I often ate toasts, I don’t have a toaster.) And later onions became scarce too. Way too sweet. Always hated meat and sweetness (paprika isn’t too sweet, that is FINE :D).
Of course, clove fans who like sweet and not raw cloves with their meat should enjoy it I couldn’t.
OMG. That was something like… Fried cloves! Or dish for the whole village!
Yeah - it does take a good bit of cooking, like 40 minutes at 400° F or 200° C, for garlic, or longer at lower temperatures. My wife and I used to stab pork roasts with a knife, then insert garlic cloves into the ‘wound.’ The bigger ones could still be a little tough. There’s usually a significant gap between the right temperatures for meat (lower) and vegetables (higher) for proper doneness.
For garlic by itself, we’ll leave the garlic bulb together, cut across the tops of the cloves, drizzle it all with olive oil, then bake it wrapped in foil. It ends up ‘pasty’ and easy to squeeze out the garlic from the skins. And damn good.
Good point, makes sense. Garlic is powerful, and even in a sealed plastic container, some of the smell/essence comes out in the refrigerator (I end up wrapping the container in a whole bunch of plastic bags). So it wouldn’t be a big surprise if the peeled stuff loses something.
That said, I’ve roasted peeled garlic in a baking dish, mostly covered with olive oil, and it comes out excellent. I guess there should be a side-by-side comparison.
I’ve heard that it you toss garlic bulbs (I think after cutting off the top) on a smoker, they come out nice and tender with smokiness. I keep forgetting to try this, though. Will need to remember the next time I fire up the smoker.
Garlic gets really mild when cooked for a long period of time. I’m not a huge fan of near-raw garlic, but these had no relationship to those. Very tasty.
There was a guy in my church, from a well-known local family, who owned and ran what he called an “eco-farm.” One of the products he made and sold was black garlic, which is aged in high humidity and probably somewhat fermented. It apparently has an exotic taste, and a lot of the sharpness is mellowed in the aging process.
Guy used to tout its healthful and medicinal properties, but it is apparently prized in Asian cuisine for its flavour.
I do think we’ve gotten away from too many old-style processing techniques. Listened to a book where they discussed eating basically everything from a pig or other farm animals. I’m assuming eating that way could/would be more helpful and nutritious, just think of all the gelatin we’d get (instead of having to buy fancy collagen peptides).
I’m trying to get back toward that, but it’s hard to find time to do some of this.
But I think things like fermenting everything probably does have benefits.
And I think one proper place for plants is medicinal. I wouldn’t doubt his garlic has some medicinal properties.
Fermenting definitely does something. For instance, last summer, I had a bumper crop of hot peppers. I fermented them, and I barely got any “negative” reactions when I ate the fermented ones. But normally eating hot peppers causes me an immediate reaction, basically similar to an allergic reaction (though some people say that’s what hot peppers are supposed to do).
I couldn’t.