I call them "gooey flavor bullets"

One of my favorite recipes, and the easiest way to infuse insane flavor into a myriad of dishes, is roasted garlic. [Is it even a "recipe" if it's one ingredient? Ah well.] A whole head of garlic, coated in olive oil and sprinkled with salt and pepper, and then roasted in a hot oven (400 plus) for an hour or so, will yield a head full of ooey, gooey, sweet, delicious garlic cloves that squirt out of the papery skin and simply BEG to be put into mashed potatoes, your favorite soup, steamed veggies, or to be schmeared on meat about to be grilled, a delicious gourmet cracker … or the end of one’s finger.

The "before" picture.

Smoking garlic is the exact same procedure, only the foil-wrapped heads of deliciousness are smoked for a couple of hours over wood chips at about 200 degrees.

Two racks of smoking garlic.

I recently acquired an outdoor cooking machine that uses either charcoal, wood or propane, and can grill, smoke, steam, deep-fry, boil, and generally cook the hell out of anything. As part of the initial steps recommended by the manufacturer, before I used the smoker for the first time I “seasoned” it by lighting mesquite charcoal and then placing mesquite wood chips over it and letting the smoker smoke without any food inside. The manufacturer recommends 4 hours of seasoning.

I was already planning to smoke garlic. My enterprising brother-in-law had done it before in his smoker, with delicious results, but he only did a few heads at a time. I had a bag of a couple dozen heads. I was seasoning my grill for about half of the recommended time when I started to prep the garlic, and it occurred to me that “seasoning” my new smoker with mesquite AND with garlic could not possibly go wrong. Then, I figured, as long as I am smoking things …

 

Garlic and jalapeno.

 

When they were smoked, I put the whole heads (some of them with the smoked jalapeno also) in jars with olive oil, and sealed them. Now they’ll keep for about a year … but we may not get to test their durability, as I am positive they won’t sit in anyone’s cupboard for that long!

 

Canned mesquite-smoked garlic and jalapenos.

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