Confit Garlic: Long Oil Poaching

Confit garlic — cloves cooked slowly in oil at low temperature until completely tender and sweet — appears across Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking as both an ingredient and a condiment. The technique transforms raw garlic's pungent, sharp character into something mellow, sweet, almost nutty. Ottolenghi uses it throughout as a background seasoning that provides garlic depth without garlic sharpness.

Garlic cloves (peeled or unpeeled) submerged in olive oil and cooked at very low temperature — 90–100°C — until completely tender, sweet, and golden. The oil absorbs the garlic flavour and becomes as valuable as the cloves themselves. [VERIFY temperature]

• French confit (same low-temperature oil poaching principle applied to duck or pork), Japanese garlic chips (higher temperature variation), Spanish ajo confitado (identical technique)

Confit garlic squeezed from its skin is one of the most versatile condiments in the kitchen — spread on bread, stirred into hummus, mashed into butter, dropped into braises. Its sweetness is the opposite of raw garlic's sharpness. The two forms of the same ingredient are entirely different flavour tools.