How to make confit garlic oil while you sleep

You’ll end up with two cups of garlic oil and dozens of melting-soft confit garlic cloves.

Confit garlic Source: Camellia Aebischer

This recipe is so simple it only includes two ingredients: garlic and oil.

Once you’ve made it, there’s no limit to where you can spread the miraculous, sweet, soft garlic cloves. Mash it into potato, mix into butter or mayo, blend into sauces or served on the table as a condiment are just a few options.

What you’ll need is a slow cooker and a little time up your sleeve. Thyme would work great too actually, so feel free to add any hard herbs or aromatics you like. Chilli flakes, lemon rind, fennel seeds or rosemary sprigs come to mind.

All you'll need is some garlic and your oil of choice. Source: Camellia Aebischer

How to make confit garlic oil

This recipe is so flexible you can make it with as little or as many cloves as you like, just make sure there’s enough oil to cover them in the base of a slow cooker – or just add more for extra leftover garlic oil.

I used five heads of garlic and 2.5 cups of extra-virgin olive oil. Place whole peeled garlic cloves in the bottom of your slow cooker. Cover in olive oil or other neutral oil (canola would work fine).

This was with two cups, it needed an extra glug to cover the garlic completely, though it will depend on your slow cooker. Source: Camellia Aebischer

Set the cooker on low-medium for one hour, until cloves are lightly sizzling. Check your slow cooker manual and ensure the low temperature is greater than 100 degrees; This is important to kill off any potentially harmful bacteria. Alternatively, you can set it to med-high and let it sizzle for 10 minutes before reducing the temperature.

Then, turn down to ‘warm’ setting and leave for anywhere from 6-10 hours.

Spoon into clean jars and make sure you store them at or below 5°C in the fridge (they’ll keep for about a week). Don’t leave a jar of this on the bench otherwise, you run the risk of botulism developing in the garlic cloves, which is rare but can be dangerous.

I put some of these on a pizza recently and did not regret it. Source: Camellia Aebischer

If you want to keep them longer you can freeze portions. I also separate the cloves from some of the oil to make them easier to access as good olive oil will solidify in the fridge. If you want to avoid it, use canola instead.

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