Why hello there, and welcome back once more to Kitchen Catastrophes, where one man struggles to sauté, brulée, and plié. I’m your dancing delicatessen, Jon O’Guin. Today’s post is gonna take a bit of time. To make, not to do. It’s super easy to DO. So let’s not waste time explaning when you’ll need time for doing, and get right to it. Shit, I forgot the link. Alright, NOW let’s get to it.

Stewing In My Own Grease

That title sounded much better in our head. ANYWAY, yes, as the title suggests, we’re talking about confit again, and if you don’t know what it means, our digusting turn of phrase is the basic summary: confit is a method of cooking (primarily meat) at a low temp in pure fat. As this link, to an article written by none other than recent site darling J Kenji Lopez-Alt lays out, and as we mostly covered in our Broccoli confit post, confit was initially developed as a preservation method: the fat cooks the meat in an anaerobic (airless) environment, keeping bacteria from affecting it. (This is where the ‘pure’ qualifier on the fat comes into play: a flavored or previously used fat may have particulates and other facets that make it less effective as a preserving medium.)

Originally, you would actually cure the meat overnight, cook-it gently for a long time in relatively cool oil, and then move the mixture into a container. Depending on the oil used, it might harden as it cools, further protecting the meat.

I was considering doing a picture of an athletic cup, for the obvious “protecting meat” joke. But if little league taught me anything, it was that you can’t whip out your cup so close to dinner.

The technique was invented in Southern France, and has long been a signature move of the haute cuisine: remember, as our Fictional Frenchman explained, a heavy element of haute cuisine was, in the…crap, I always forget what you call like, the 1400’s to the 1700’s. Is it the Enlightenment Era, and then the Renaissance in the 1600’s, or vice versa? (I Googled it, it’s the second one: Renaissance, THEN Enlightenment) A HEAVY ELEMENT of haute cuisine by the time of the Renaissance was, basically, showing off. So while the technique was originally invented as a way to preserve food out of necessity, the elite took to it as a sign of excess: a food slow-cooked for hours in excess fat, to provide a single fall-apart soft duck leg or other piece as the center of a dish was a hell of a move. It helped that, mechanically, confit works (to steal an assertion from the Kenji article) as the barbecue to deep-frying’s grilling: low, slow cooking that breaks down connective tissue and produces a soft and delicious product. If you see a dish described as ‘oil-poached’, that’s functionally just a slightly more intelligible name for the same process. (From a very technical standpoint, confit can have a wider range of oil temperatures than poaching can, and typically goes on for longer, but the two are VERY comparable)

And while THE iconic and classic confit dish is duck, a close second is Garlic. Garlic confit is basically Roast garlic, with less browning on the outer garlic cloves. They all get the same amount of cooking. AND it creates a bunch of garlic-infused olive oil! It’s a win-win! And it’s how we start today’s recipe, so le’s stop jibber-jabbing, and start cookie-crabbin’.

A made-up phrase I worried I couldn’t find pictures for, but thankfully the internet provides.

Hurry Up and Wait

As I said earlier, this is a recipe that’s very simple, but takes a while. And the first step is a great example of it, because step one of this recipe is to peel THIRTY garlic cloves. (Or, plan ahead and just buy pre-peeled garlic) I tried the “shaking” method (if you place a bunch of unpeeled garlic cloves in a bowl and shake them vigorously for like, a minute, you’ll rub off the skins) Unfortunately, I’m a little wimpy puss, (and my mother was watching television in the other room) so I only shook the bowls for like, 20 seconds a burst, meaning I didn’t get all the skins off.

There’s a couple peeled ones in here, you just can’t see them.

It’s also not all that much faster for small batches (like, if it takes 10-15 seconds to just peel garlic by hand, then you’d need to be using more than 5 cloves of garlic for this to be worth it) I ended up shaking in bursts, and then just peeling the ones that didn’t self-peel. All in all, I’d say it was like, 3 minutes to get them all?

Next is the SECOND fiddly step! (I assure you, the difficulty of this recipe, like Sofia Vergara, is HEAVILY front-loaded.) See, if you’ve roasted garlic, you probably know that the root end of the clove basically never gets as soft as the rest of the clove. Well, that’s true here, and we definitely don’t want those stubborn assholes fucking up our texture later, so it’s time to snip the tips off those suckers, like a little garlic rabbi. (That is not at all how circumcision works, and I’ve hurt myself with the mental image of it.) Once you’ve trimmed 30 tiny garlic dicks (STOP), the next step is to get in a small (but relatively deep) saucepan, with some oil. What oil? Where, there’s a couple ways to approach it. As noted earlier, if you go full olive oil, you get a bunch of infused olive oil. The ‘downside’ to that is that olive oil is not a “neutral” oil: it will flavor the garlic slightly, and the infusion of garlic flavor will be mixed with its natural flavors. By contrast, canola oil is a neutral oil, so it won’t impart much flavor, and will come out much more ‘purely garlic’. There’s literally no right answer here, do whatever you prefer. I went half-and-half, rather than make any important choices. You want 1 cup total, and you want it to totally cover the cloves in the saucepan (hence why it’s got to be fairly small: 1 cup of liquid has to be deep enough to cover the bottom and then some.)

Behold, stationary objects in still liquid!

Turn the heat to medium low, until you get a bare simmer, and then reduce the heat to low, so you have little bubbles around the garlic, but they’re not really disturbing the top of the oil. Let that cook for 35 minutes, stirring occasionally, or misread that step and leave it for 45 minutes undisturbed. The garlic should slightly tan over the cooking process, and should further color a little more in the next step: remove the pan from heat, and let the oil infuse for 15 minutes.

Now, for a true, long-term confit, you’d move this all to the same jar, and store for WEEKS in the fridge, using a clean spoon to remove oil or cloves as needed. I’m going to use ALL the garlic from this recipe in like, 2 days, so I stored them separately.

I thought I had a picture of both tubs, but apparently not, so here’s the garlic oil.

Speaking of, all of this was on…Wednesday. So let’s learn what I did with the garlic!

Crushing My Dreams To Dust

I made Garlic-Parmesan Cheese Coins! Cheese Coins is a fancy term for “cheese-based crackers”, which is an odd designation for reasons we’ll get into later, but the recipe is, like the confit recipe itself, front-loaded with difficulty. Like, the most involved steps are all at the front, and most of the rest of it is “and now wait”. First, you gotta grate an ounce of Parmesan!

I don’t know why I ended that with an exclamation point. I mean I love Parmesan, but it’s not a lot.

Then, you gotta paste your garlic. I just took out the pyrex dish I stored it in (I think, technically, it was a glass Tupperware, which is maybe the most suburban mom thing I’ve ever corrected myself on.) and mashed all the garlic with a spoon until smooth enough that I hoped it wouldn’t embarrass me.

Don’t shame me in front of company, damn it!

Next, form the dough: toss some flour, salt, pepper, the Parmesan, and a pince of cayenne into a food processor. (A lot of recipes use cayenne in rich cheese dishes, presumably to help cut through some of the fat) Process it all together for like, 1 minute. Then, add the garlic paste, and an entire stick of butter, cut into 8 chunks. Process for another 35 seconds, shaking the device if needed to bring everything together. Around second 15 or 20, you’re going to get a ball forming. That’s good, it’s exactly what you want. At around 35 seconds, my ball had absorbed MOST of the dough, at which point I stopped.

“Behold my doughball!” - What I shout before going out on the beach.

Get that out onto a surface, mixing it with your hands to get it all together if you need to, and cut into 2 halves. Roll the halves out to roughly 8” logs a little over an inch wide, wrap, and DEFINITELY put in the FRIDGE for an hour. Which is certainly what I DID! I didn’t misread and freeze my version for an hour. (That’s not a totally bad thing, though: you CAN freeze this dough, and then just thaw it to use later.)

Why aren’t my tubes even? Well, that’s natural for many. And I’m bad at estimating what exactly 8” is, as many men are.

After at least an hour to firm (NOT FREEZE) up, it’s time to cut the logs into coins. Literally just cut roughly ¼” thick slices from the log, and place on parchment paper on a rimmed baking sheet. Pop those sheets into a 325 degree oven for 16 minutes, flipping the pans around after 8 minutes. Or, if, say, you fucked up and froze the logs, I THEORETICALLY believe a cooking time of around 20 minutes would be pretty close to right. Maybe. This is my first time making them, I have no idea what texture I’m aiming for.

Pop onto a wire rack to cool, and serve.

I don’t know whether the natural light or kitchen light makes them look more appealing.

Now, remember that you might have accidentally frozen them, and that may have affected their texture and flavor, but as it…I get why these are called a “cracker”, because you can’t reasonably call it anything else. It’s not a bread, or a roll. The Closest thing I would compare it to is a savory short-bread cookie. Nate’s review of his first bite as that it tastes like dry. Not ‘It’s a little dry”, it TASTES like its purpose is to dry your mouth out. There’s a granular texture to it that makes it feel like maybe somehow not all the flour got incorporated. Interestingly, the more pretentiously I ate them, the better they were: if you have like, 2 or 3 at a time, the kind-of faint garlic cheese flavor builds, especially if you eat the cracker like you would sip wine at a wine tasting, rolling it around your mouth, and breaking it down.

I think it would work AS a kind of fancy cracker, since it really wants a little extra moisture. Get like, a drizzle of honey on it, with some more cheese, or a bit of ham or turkey. Maybe just a pepper jelly. It’s interesting, but not amazing. It’s also really easy, and only one of dozens of ways you could use Garlic Confit. I just needed to get something Cheesy and Bread-y to round out the week.

This is in the wrong place, but I refuse to move it because we're already running late.

MONDAY: I STILL DON’T KNOW, AND HAVE MOSTLY FORGOTTEN WHAT I INTENDED. SHIT. LET’S SEE. UM… I COULD DO TWO RECIPES FROM JEAN GEORGES AGAIN. OH, AND ONE OF THEM’S A CRACKER! THAT COULD BE RELEVANT. I GOTTA COOK A LOT OF MEAT FAIRLY SOON…LET’S DO BEETS AND CRISPS. IT’S WEIRD, BUT ALSO PROBABLY A GOOD PURGATIVE SINCE I JUST SPEND A WEEK EATING A SHIT TON OF BUTTER AND CHEESE.

THURSDAY/FRIDAY: STILL DON’T KNOW. LET SATURDAY JON FIGURE IT OUT, AND WE’LL GET BACK TO YOU.

Here's the

Recipe

Garlic Confit

Makes about ½ cup confit (when crushed into paste)

Ingredients

1 cup extra-virgin olive oil or vegetable oil, or a combination

30 garlic cloves, peeled (roughly 2 heads or around ¾ cup), root ends trimmed

Preparation

Combine oil and garlic in small saucepan (garlic should be just submerged. If not, add extra oil to cover). Bring to bare simmer over medium-low heat. Reduce heat to low so tiny bubbles surround garlic, but garlic is not actively frying. Continue to cook, stirring occasionally, until garlic is soft and pale tan, 30 to 35 minutes longer. (Garlic should be soft enough to smear on plate with back of spoon.)
Off heat, let garlic cool in oil for at least 15 minutes (garlic will darken slightly as it cools). Using slotted spoon, transfer garlic to airtight container. Strain oil through fine-mesh strainer into separate airtight container and reserve for another use.

Garlic Parmesan Coins

Makes 64 crackers

Ingredients

1 ½ cups (7½ ounces) all-purpose flour

1 ounce Parmesan cheese, grated (½ cup)

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon table salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

Pinch cayenne pepper

1 recipe Garlic Confit

8 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into 8 pieces and chilled

Preparation

In small bowl, mash garlic confit with spatula or fork to form smooth paste. Process flour, Parmesan, baking powder, salt, pepper, and cayenne in food processor until combined, about 10 seconds. Add butter and garlic paste and process until dough forms ball, about 35 seconds (there may be small bits of loose dough). Transfer dough to counter and divide in half. Roll each half into 8-inch log, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate until firm, at least 1 hour.
Adjust oven racks to upper-middle and lower-middle positions and heat oven to 325 degrees. Line 2 rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper. Unwrap logs and slice into ¼-inch-thick coins. Space coins ½ inch apart on prepared sheets. Bake until light golden around edges, about 16 minutes, switching and rotating sheets halfway through baking. Transfer sheets to wire racks and let coins cool completely on sheets before serving. (Coins can be stored in airtight container at room temperature for up to 1 week.)