GARLIC CONFIT

LITTLE MORE THAN PEELED GARLIC CLOVES SLOW COOKED IN A MIX OF olive and canola oil, garlic confit has become my near-universal replacement for butter. Confiting mellows raw garlic, removing its bite and making it sweet, soft, and unctuous.

Chefs use tons of butter because it makes everything taste better. But it’s not altogether necessary. Try adding garlic confit when you make pan sauces (it adds body and flavor, just like butter!), use it as a spread for sandwiches (it’s spreadable and savory, just like butter!), and enrich a broth with it (it dissolves when heated, just like butter!).

For me, using garlic confit in place of butter has been life changing. It will transform the way you cook in as many ways as you use butter, while improving your health. Garlic confit is the kind of pantry item every home cook needs: huge flavor payoff with barely any effort. Garlic confit and puree are in every one of my restaurants; I’ve used them in my Michelin-starred restaurant as well as my less formal places.

When I began trying to come up with ways to make silken sauces without resorting to unhealthy fats, I started by pureeing confited vegetables, which worked beautifully. But when I tried the same technique with garlic, I was floored. There was no going back. It seems that whenever I make a dish in a pan, I find myself reaching for the cloves or puree, adding them by the tablespoonful to the liquid in the pan to give it another layer of flavor. In fact, garlic confit is a perfect example of how I like to build layers of flavor into a dish; you can sauté raw garlic in the confit oil, then add the puree to the pan to intensify the overall effect.

With garlic confit on hand, you can go from using the cloves whole in a garlicky roast chicken (here), or spread on a chicken sandwich (here), or puree and stir into practically any pan dish to make an unctuous pan sauce, or spread on slices of whole grain bread for the best garlic bread (here) you’ve ever had in your life (no exaggeration).

Or make linguine in the richest clam sauce (here); or more accurately, it’s (more) clams in (less) linguine, and in just 10 minutes. This pasta reinforces the practice of flopping the ingredient proportions in keeping with the Mediterranean approach to pasta as a side dish.

When I began thinking about the confit as a replacement for butter, the Greek in me turned directly to phyllo, which is generally made flaky with the addition of lots of butter. But rather than try to work with the pastry at all, I took the ingredients in the classic Greek spinach pie known as spanakopita and rolled them up in a tender (and healthier) sole fillet (here). It is this kind of thinking that I hope becomes second nature to you as you make your way through Live to Eat.

Basically, any time you reach for a fat, resist the urge and pull out your container of garlic confit, use a slotted spoon to remove the cloves, and toss them into your dish. And all of that oil? It carries a tremendous amount of garlic flavor. Use it to make a garlic vinaigrette or Red Wine Vinaigrette (here), or slick the pan with it whenever olive oil is called for. You should even cook your scrambled eggs in it.