This is a pantry basic in our kitchen here at Food on Fifth and has been for quite a few years. It’s easy and incredibly useful for everyday cooking. This pantry basic saves a lot of time, while combining two things we start most meals with….olive oil and garlic.

This all started when we were on a photo shoot a few years ago. The food client sent in a gigantic jar of fresh, whole, peeled garlic cloves. There were hundreds in the jar. We only used a few for the recipes we were preparing. We are a group who does not easily toss out good food. The last day we dumped all the garlic into a roasting pan, filled it with olive oil, completely covering the cloves, set the oven on 325 degrees and let the roasting do the rest. 45 minutes later we had a huge pan of perfectly roasted garlic. We let it cool down completely, divided it among canning jars and each of us took home our own little bit of heaven. Did I say how aromatic the studio was? People kept coming back and asking us what that aroma was all day…just garlic.

So now I do this on a regular basis so I always have garlic roasted in olive oil in my fridge. I don’t have access to a gigantic jar of fresh garlic cloves, but a few local import markets have pretty nice sized jars of peeled, fresh garlic as do some larger supermarkets. As I scoop out of the jar to use when cooking, I always add a bit of olive oil back to the jar so the garlic is always covered completely to keep the contents from going “bad”. It works like a charm. It is as easy-as-this every time.