The 1-Step Garlic Trick That Makes It Sweet, Not Harsh

I find garlic so essential that I grow 150 to 200 heads each year—enough to store, share, and plant next season’s crop. I use garlic cloves in everything from breakfast potatoes to pasta, and even feature them in sweeter creations like pear preserves.

Garlic tastes pungent and harsh when raw, but that all changes when you roast it. The cloves actually have more natural sugar than onions, a vegetable in the same plant family. Just as cooking onions low and slow makes them softer and sweeter, roasting caramelizes garlic’s hidden sugars and makes its firm cloves so creamy you can smear them like butter on toast.

I often eat the roasted cloves like that, but they play well with other flavors, too. For a more mellow garlic flavor without that sharp bite, roast the garlic.

 When I Use Roasted Garlic

Even briefly sautéing garlic mellows its sharp bite, so recipes typically heat it along with other ingredients for a dip served hot, such as spinach artichoke dip. Stir in roasted garlic at the end instead, and the flavor becomes even richer. Whenever I’m roasting ingredients for a dip, like eggplant for baba ganoush, I throw the garlic in the oven, too.

Uncooked dips and spreads change even more dramatically when you make the switch. Raw garlic stands out so much in a fresh yogurt sauce like tzatziki that it’s tempting to leave it out. But roasted garlic matches the creaminess of the yogurt and the mildness of the cucumber. Squeeze roasted garlic into the food processor when you make hummus, and the spread becomes even smoother.

Roasted garlic tastes less intense than its raw form, so I often use twice as many caramelized cloves.

How To Roast Garlic

When I plan to display a whole head of garlic on a cheese board, I follow this recipe for roasted garlic. But I skip many of the steps if I’m going to mix the cloves into a dip. I drizzle the unpeeled, uncut garlic head with a little olive oil and set it on a tray next to whatever else I’m cooking in a 350°F to 400°F oven. In summer, I roast a head every time I fire up an outdoor grill. By the time the coals have burned themselves out, the garlic is perfectly soft with bonus charred notes.

Roasted garlic keeps well for up to four days, so I roast a fresh head every time I use up the last one in my fridge.