Smoked Garlic

I usually like to start my posts with a nice bit of food porn -  a sexy photo meant to entice you, the reader, to read the entire article.  Sadly, in the case of the great smoked garlic debacle of 2009, I have nothing to offer.  I did take some pictures of my experiment,  but the ultimate outcome led me to go with stark text instead.  I have never heard of smoked garlic.  A reader from Amsterdam had sent me a note about my smoked chicken salad recipe.  When I went to check out his blog, Vegetarian Duck,  I noticed a post that made reference to a few heads of smoke garlic that someone had given him.  I immediately began some furious googling to see what I had been missing all these years.  It sounded like a marriage made in heaven - smoke and garlic.  However, there was a surprising lack of information out there on the Internets.  Most everything I found was very European in origin.  It seems that smoked garlic is readily available in street kiosks all over France but in very few other locations.   I even went so far as to call all my BBQ and chef buddies and ask them if they had ever heard of smoked garlic.  Not one single American had ever heard of such a thing. 

 So, I threw caution to the wind.  I went and bought a couple pounds of garlic and threw them on the smoker at 225 degrees.  3 hours later I had some very stinky and soft garlic.  After peeling the skins and making a nice compound butter from the garlic, I spread it on some toasted baguette.  What did I taste?  Garlic.  I tasted nothing but garlic.  There was no hint or suggestion of smoke.  Hell yes, the outside of the garlic was brown and stank of hickory, but somehow it did not translate to the actual cloves themselves.  After some more googling, I discovered that quite a few people had run into the same quandary.  Perhaps I needed to go for a day long cold smoke.  Perhaps I needed to strip the cloves down naked before I introduced them to the hickory smoke.  Perhaps I'll pursue this experiment another day.  For now, I'm a little bummed out.  What should have been a simple endeavor turned out to be a little bit of a Waterloo.  If you are out there on the Hyperweb reading this now and you know where I went wrong, I beg you to let me know where my mistakes took place.  Please.

As one final note, please don't blame my friend over at Vegetarian Duck for my mistakes.  He runs a hell of a good blog and I think he's the bee's knees.  I'm pretty sure this smoked garlic stuff is some sort of French conspiracy because they are jealous they didn't invent BBQ.

Comments

[Mark]

Still haven't gotten around to an in-depth tasting of the ones I've got...thanks for not shooting the messenger....

[Mark]

Ah! Also, there is nothing soft about my smoked garlic, it's 100% firm, must be cold-smoked?

[Mark]

OK, to bring this comment monologue to a close...I tasted the "smoked" garlic attentively today, and: nothing but garlic. Zero smoke. So, among the rhetorical questions I have is,"why smoke it?"

[JustPassingThru]

Smoked Garlic! A little bit of Heaven here on Earth,take a head of garlic, cut the top end off so that all of the cloves have been cut, place in a shallow aluminium pan, pour olive oil over the heads of garlic, smoke at 250° for 1-11/2 hour, let cool and squeeze out the garlic, mash, puree, whatever and mix into butter or add to whatever you are using garlic in, simply delicious! Enjoy

[Randall Berger]

G'day ... I've started a Facebook page dedicated to smoked garlic ... Ail Fume Smoked Garlic ... with places all over the world where you can get it. Cheers.

[Beachwooddude]

What you talking about Willis? Take the peeled garlic in the big bags from Costco or Smart and Final, add a little olive oil and roast them for 2 hrs in smoker OMG, grind up and put in Cream Cheese or Mayo. Dip with crackers or fry up a egg sandwich. TONS of smoke flavor added to garlic...