I seem to always be several years behind on the big Internet cooking trends.
I can’t tell if that’s because I’m skeptical of the hype or because I have too many recipes to try already.
This week, though, I finally crossed one that I just hadn’t gotten around to off my list: garlic confit.
Apparently, I’m just in the mood for weird French cooking terms lately.
I wasn’t totally sure what constituted “confit,” but an article by J. Kenji López-Alt on the website “Serious Eats” breaks down the process.
Essentially, López-Alt writes, “The word confit (pronounced ‘kon-FEE’) derives from the French verb confire, which simply means to preserve.”
He goes on to write that, to confit, meats or vegetables are traditionally slowly cooked in fat and fruits in a super-concentrated sugar syrup, which is supposed to kill off bacteria and keep it from growing later on.
López-Alt said the way we use the term confit in modern cooking isn’t quite true to the tradition (or the part of speech), but it’s generally adjacent.
In the case of this week’s recipe, my goal wasn’t necessarily preservation so much as wanting to completely transform fresh garlic.
I read a few different techniques before I began my process, and I ended up combining several ideas to get where I wanted to go. America’s Test Kitchen and the Food Network have nice posts about the process and how they did it, for example, that are both a good read.
In the end, I decided I wanted pure slow-roasted garlic, so while a lot of people add herbs like rosemary to their confit, I opted to leave it alone.
Garlic Confit
Ingredients
- at least 3 or 4 bulbs garlic
- enough olive oil to cover the cloves I used extra virgin
Instructions
- Peel the whole cloves, trimming just a sliver off each to remove the root ends, and place them in a small oven-safe dish. (They don’t need to be spaced out at all. You just need enough room to cover them in oil.)
- (As a side note on peeling garlic, I watched various people online put several cloves into a canning jar and shake them up for a bit, which had the magic effect of separating the skin from the cloves. I did this and had decent success with it, although some were still a bit stubborn. It definitely saved time, though.)
- Pour olive oil into the dish to just cover the cloves.
- Preheat the oven to 250 degrees and roast the cloves for one to one and one-half hours, checking after the first hour.
- The cloves are done when they’re a light, nutty brown and are completely soft.
- Let the garlic cool completely, and then you can use both the cloves and the oil in recipes where a concentrated garlic flavor would be desireable.
- Or, you can eat it spread onto crusty bread and sprinkled with some of your favorite seasonings. Just strain the cloves from the garlic and spread them with a knife.
- Store the cloves and oil in the refrigerator.
We are big into garlic at our house, so the hidden benefit of this was the aroma that filled our house while it roasted.
The final product was a rich, concentrated garlic flavor that we have used for all kinds of applications, from a pasta that I’ll share with you soon to spreading it on burgers. The roasting process takes some of the bite out of the garlic, but it leaves all the flavor.
And I have to be honest, I’m a little mad I didn’t try this sooner. But now that I have little containers of garlic confit and garlic-infused oil in my fridge, I can’t wait to find a ton of ways to use it before I run out. The French got this one right.
This piece first appeared in print June 25, 2026.
Spice Up Your Life is a weekly newspaper column written by Lindsey Young in south central Kansas. If you are interested in sponsoring this column, please contact us through the “Contact Lindsey” link at the top of the page.
