If you’ve never made garlic confit at home, prepare to have a new staple in your kitchen. This is one of those simple, quiet techniques that instantly makes you a better cook without doing anything complicated. It’s literally just garlic, olive oil, and low heat — but the payoff tastes like something you’d expect from a restaurant with a three-week waitlist.
I use garlic confit constantly in my cooking, but especially when I’m developing new bread recipes for Boghosian Roots. It adds this deep, mellow sweetness that raw garlic can never give you, and it blends beautifully into doughs, toppings, sauces, soups, pastas… everything. It’s one of those ingredients that just elevates without calling attention to itself.
The trick — and the reason I love this method — is patience. Garlic needs gentle heat to soften and caramelize without burning. When you cook it low and slow, the cloves turn buttery and spreadable, almost like roasted garlic jam. And the leftover olive oil? That’s liquid gold. I drizzle it on focaccia, brush it onto toasted bread, toss it with pasta, or save it for marinades. Nothing goes to waste.
This garlic confit pairs beautifully with my One-Day Focaccia recipe. The mellow sweetness of the garlic is exactly what that crisp, airy bread wants.
If you’re building a pantry of foundational recipes — the kind that make weekday cooking easier and weekend cooking more exciting — start here. Garlic confit is simple, timeless, and endlessly useful. And once you make it, I promise you’ll keep a jar in your fridge at all times.
Garlic confit is mellow and sweet, so it pairs well with:
Soft, jammy garlic gently cooked in olive oil until sweet and spreadable. Perfect for focaccia, bread, pasta, soups, and sauces.
Add the peeled garlic cloves to a small Dutch oven or oven-safe dish.
Pour in enough olive oil to mostly submerge the cloves.
Sprinkle with Salt and cover with the lid (or foil).
Let cool slightly before mashing or using whole.