Plus you are going to get a dried and toughened inner integument on the clove instead of something that can be easily mashed, and coating the cloves themselves in oil is just going to make them slimy. Give it a go and you’ll see what I mean.
Also, you should really put the cut tip of the clove in a small heat-reistant dish of oil so it absorbs the oil as it roasts, keeping it nice and tender. If you want the cloves sweeter, mix in some honey or agave. If you want the, spicy, ground pepper, cloves, or whatever other flavor you want them to pick up.
Holy crap, you know stuff about rockets and garlic? :eek: You, sir, are a true polymath.
A local pizza shop offers roasted garlic as a topping. It’s not garlic paste extruded from an oven-baked head of garlic, it’s whole cloves that appear to have been roasted in the fashion I described; they’re slightly browned on the outside, and soft and delicious through and through. That’s what makes me want to try this.
I’ve been amply warned, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. Worst that happens is I’ve wasted a buck or two.
I’ve seen, on various Mexican cooking shows, that garlic can be roasted on a comal, the process involves no oil at all. I don’t see why your technique wouldn’t work, just keep the cloves to the cooler side of the grill so they can stay on it longer. Oil half, leave half naked, and see what happens. Wait for a garlic sale at the market.
Well, I was once a cook. Just a lowly, lowly cook. I have never, however, been a Navy SEAL.
By all means give it a try; as you note, the cost if you don’t like the result is low, and you may find some means to make it as you like. I would caution that you keep the temperature as low as possible and keep the garlic from direct view of the charcoal or heating elements so that they roast slowly and completely from inside out. I would personally leave the outer skin of the cloves on while doing this; once it is roasted it’ll just peel off like a candy bar wrapper. Try doing a few each way and see how it works for you.
Maybe it’s just because most people don’t have a suitable wire-mesh basket. You’ll have to put the garlic in something, or it’ll just fall through. And foil is something that’ll work for that that most people have.
Every time I fire up the grill I put a head of garlic drizzled with oil and wrapped in foil on the top rack, even before preheating is complete. I ignore it there until the beef/poultry/lamb/fish is done, then I take the foil wrapped garlic head off and let it cool down before unwrapping.
Note that some people (for example, my family) prefer that “bitter” garlic taste. It’s what makes garlic more yummy than onion or radish.
We typically put the garlic (a whole head) directly on the grill, off in the corner where it’s not directly over the flame, but still gets plenty of radiative heat. Flip and rotate several times until its well done. Then pop the innards out of what’s left of the paper and enjoy!
Put some chicken into a baking dish. Put 40 cloves of garlic around the pieces. Season with salt and pepper and add some white wine. Cover and bake until the chicken is done, uncovering at some point to brown the pieces. The garlic will have absorbed some chicken fat. You can squeeze the garlic our of their husks and mash them in a saucepan with some cream to make a sauce. But I always just squeezed the cloves onto French bread and ate them that way.
I coated the bare cloves in olive oil, and then put them in a wire-mesh basket on the grill. I also put some applewood chips in a foil packet on one of the burner bars for smoke. You can start with decent heat at first, but you need to turn it down to low in fairly short order, and don’t let the garlic sit for too long in one position; I gave the basket a shake every few minutes. The basket makes it easy to shake them around, and a lot of the oil gets rubbed off over time. After maybe half an hour, they were nicely browned and beginning to wrinkle just a tiny bit (loss of moisture), so I called it quits. a bite from the biggest clove confirmed they were cooked through, not slimy and not tough. They made a nice addition to fried rice that evening, and also to a lunch salad the next day. I will be doing this again someday.
