Chef Joseph Di Perri, associate professor at the Culinary Institute of America, is no stranger to garlic's many culinary uses.
Di Perri and his students once prepared an all-garlic menu for visitors to the Hyde Park, New York culinary college's student-staffed Italian restaurant. "It even included as dessert sweet ricotta fritters with ginger and garlic," along with more-traditional Caesar salad and Cornish game hen with fresh tomato, garlic and oregano sauce, he said.
Food vendors at the annual Hudson Valley Garlic Festival, which takes place the last weekend of September in Saugerties, New York, often surprise visitors with their creativity. Offerings have included garlic ice cream and garlic cannoli as well as more traditional foods such as pasta and pesto.
Garlic festival founder Pat Reppert included 12 recipes for garlic-based desserts in her cookbook, Mad for Garlic, published in 1997 by Quixote Press. “Most of them are grandchildren-tested,” such as crunch apple garlic cake and garlic frosted carrot cake, she said. "My grandchildren didn’t even know there was garlic in it,” she said, adding she feels the flavor of garlic blends well with either chocolate or apples.
Garlic Tips from the Experts
- Consumers should select garlic with very firm and tightly packed cloves. "At home, if I buy a head of garlic and want to keep it for awhile without it going bad, I'll peel it all, and puree it with olive oil," Di Perri said. Be sure to keep the leftover garlic-oil mix refrigerated and use it within three weeks.
- That's because cooks need to use caution when storing garlic and oils. Reppert knows of several cases of botulism poisoning that occurred when cooks stored oil mixed with garlic or other herbs at room temperature. "You have to be very careful with it. To be safe, make the oils fresh, date them and store them in the refrigerator. When you want to use it, let it sit at room temperature until the oil is no longer cloudy, only until it clears." Reppert doesn't recommend keeping infused oils any longer than three weeks.
- Rubber garlic peeling tubes, sold in many kitchen outlets, are the best way to peel garlic "so your hands don't get all full of it," according to Di Perri. "Or you can smack the clove with (the flat side of) a knife and break the skin."
- Whether cooks opt to crush or chop their garlic "really depends on the food you're cooking," Di Perri said "There are some applications where you want the taste and you don't want to see it and you can mince it or put it into a food processor with oil and refrigerate that."
- Raw garlic, while good for marinades, should never be put into food that's cooking. "Cook your garlic ahead of time, otherwise you could bite into a piece," Di Perri said. "Some recipes call for cooking it first in oil and then removing it so it leaves behind the flavor."
- Proper cooking of garlic will eliminate a lot of the problems people may have with its scent, Reppert said. “If you want a strong flavor of garlic, treat it mean, bruise it ... if you want a milder flavor, peel it gently as quickly as possibly and slice it into slivers and get it into the heat,” she said, adding that bruising a head of garlic starts a series of chemical reactions that break down into sulfur compounds and this is when the stereotypical “rank” smell of garlic develops.
- Roasting garlic is easy and yields a delicious, mild-flavored spread. "Take the entire head. We typically cut it in half and put it in aluminum foil with olive oil, salt and pepper. Put it in an oven at 375 degrees and roast it until it turns golden brown," said Di Perri. The garlic then easily pops out of its paper-like skin.
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