Roasted garlic has a milder, sweeter taste than its raw counterpart and can be less intense when you use it in recipes. This makes it a good choice for those who enjoy a gentler garlic flavor in their food rather than its typical sharp, almost spicy flavor. Roasting garlic typically involves cutting the top off a head of garlic, drizzling the revealed cloves with oil, then covering and roasting the entire head. If you have a use in mind for which this would not work, or if you simply do not need this much garlic, you can roast individual cloves instead.
Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F.
Separate a head of garlic into cloves. Rub any excess loose, papery skin off of each clove, but do not peel the cloves.
Cut both ends off each clove, leaving part of the clove exposed through the skin on each end.
Put the trimmed garlic cloves into a glass baking dish. Pour olive oil into the dish until the oil comes at least 1/4 of the way up the larger cloves of garlic, but up to halfway up these cloves. The amount of oil you will need to do this varies greatly depending on the size of your baking dish, the number of cloves you are roasting and the size of the cloves. Stir the mixture to coat the cloves in oil.
Put the baking dish of oil and garlic into your preheated oven. Roast until even the largest cloves in the dish are soft and slightly browned. This should take 20 to 30 minutes, but start checking the cloves after 10 minutes to make sure you do not burn them. Allow the cloves to cool, then squeeze them out of the skins and use as desired.
Tip
You can also roast garlic cloves by drizzling them with olive oil and wrapping them in foil. Roast at 250 degrees F. The cloves make take up to an hour to roast when you make them this way.
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Writer Bio
Morgan O'Connor has been writing professionally since 2005. Her experience includes articles on various aspects of the health-insurance industry for health-care newsletters distributed to hospitals as well as articles on both international and domestic travel.