Why You Should Make Garlic Confit

t recently occurred to me that I’ve been romanticizing roasted garlic. The cloves’ transformation from hard and pungent to soft and mellow is practically magic, and there’s nothing easier than wrapping a whole head in foil and throwing it into the oven. But when I actually peeled apart an entire oven-roasted head (profound curiosity is part of my job description), my rosy perception of this method and its product quickly changed. When cooked at 400 degrees for an hour (the standard approach), the outer cloves browned unevenly and many of the inner cloves stayed pale and tasted more steamed than roasted. To achieve evenly colored and uniformly buttery-smooth cloves, I found that I needed to drop the oven temperature to 250 degrees and then roast the garlic for a full 2 hours. Harvesting the cloves was problematic, too: Though it was satisfying to squeeze them from their papery chambers, it was also messy—not to mention