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Garlic confit

This is a quick post about an ingredient preparation I've been making on Sunday afternoons for the last few weeks: garlic confit. In case you're wondering, it's pronounced "cone'-fee" because it's French and they like to ignore letters. Confit refers to a method of cooking where you keep the temperature low (comparatively) for a while to cook whatever you're cooking covered in fat. Low and slow, covered in fat. Like me. I'm not missing the irony.

Garlic confit is a very simple thing to make. Starting off, you need garlic and an oven-safe container. Since I've been doing smaller weekly batches, I just use a ramekin.

Step one: peel the garlic and put it in the container. I generally just peel all cloves from a head of garlic, but the head I used in the first picture only had 3 cloves (the biggest in this pic), so I used some of the other head I'd already been pulling from for cooking over the last few days.

Step two: cover the garlic with fat. I use extra virgin olive oil. Apparently you can use butter, but I haven't wanted to use that much butter up on this yet. Maybe someday...

Step three (optional): I throw a little kosher salt in. I also added some black pepper today to see what happens. I've thrown in some cherry tomatoes before, too. There are always options for fun things to try. If this is your first time, though, probably best to keep it simple, but I'm not the boss of you, so do whatever the fuck you want.

Step four: cook it in an oven set to 250 degrees (that's Freedom units; go about 120C if you like the worst temperature measurement scale - fight me) for 2 hours. That's it.

Step five: let it cool, put it in a container with a lid for up to a week in your refrigerator. Use the garlic in your cooking, smear it on bread, eat it as a snack, put it in your lover's nostrils when they snore. You can also use the oil for cooking or dressing. It tastes great. It's probably not terrible for you. You're welcome.

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