I am naturally a little bit restless. When I talk on the phone, I pace throughout my apartment as if I’m a cartographer trying to figure out what every inch of the place holds. At the office, I get up frequently to get water, or tea, or a snack. I do this at home too, now that I’m working full-time from home (which I am very fortunate to be able to do: my brother got laid off two weeks ago, and I know this has happened to many of my friends, too). I had the week before last off (a previously planned staycation that was a bit more confined than I’d originally expected), and I got into a rhythm of spending a lot of my time cooking or baking. I made two loaves of bread, I made breakfast and lunch and dinner, I thought a lot about the perfect cheese sauce for tater tots. Then a friend of mine* made cherry tomato confit, a recipe from Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and I was like, okay, this seems like another fantastic use of my time! (A lot of my cooking “ideas” come from seeing a friend make something on Instagram and deciding that I Would Like To Eat That.)
I didn’t have any cherry tomatoes, but I read something mentioning garlic confit recently, somewhere, so I looked it up and came across a couple of instructions for making it. What was I going to do with it, when it was finished? I wasn’t sure. I figured it would come to me.
Enter another one of my longstanding food fixations: the savory garlic waffles I once ate at Pan Chancho on one of my earliest visits to Kingston, Ontario, which would eventually become the town I called home for 4 years. Pan Chancho had taken the waffles off the menu sometime between my first meal there and my second. When I asked the server about it, he said that hardly anyone had ordered them when they were available, but he got questions about it all the time now that they weren’t. I thought about these waffles the other day, and figured it was worth an email, if only so it didn’t take me another 12 years to think about reaching out and asking about the recipe.
It will take a while to find out if this bears any fruit, because Pan Chancho is doing the responsible thing: it is closed due to COVID-19. (In case you haven’t heard this enough: stay home!) In the meantime, I have a lot of cookbooks and a lot of garlic confit to use up. And then make again, because it is so easy and so delicious and it made my kitchen smell so good that I will definitely be making it again.
As for what I made with it: the garlic waffles tasted great, but you’ll have more luck with them than I did if you are actually good at making waffles. I don’t know what it is! I tried with a stovetop waffle iron and an electric one and things went wrong both times! But if you have more luck, I recommend eating them with cheesy scrambled eggs, or (as my friend Alyssa recommended) a poached egg, or bacon, or not bacon, or whatever you might want. They’re flexible: very slightly sweet, but mostly savory, with a just-strong-enough taste of garlic.
The galette owes its existence to my desire for a lunch that was not yet another grilled cheese. I got this issue of Bon Appétit in the mail last Monday (a lovely surprise during my impatient waits for other packages), flipped through it, stopped on this recipe. I have scallions, I thought. I have garlic. I have onions. I even have tart dough in the freezer. So I made it for lunch and had to hold myself back from eating the whole thing. While it was in the oven, I grabbed a heel of sourdough bread and dredged it in the leftover butter and bits in the pan, then smeared it with mustard, and that was heavenly too. It’s worth it even if your girlfriend won’t kiss you for the rest of the day, honestly.
* The friend is Rowan Morrison, and if you’re interested in sharp, empathetic writing about living through pandemic, I highly recommend his newsletter.
There was a very lovely little scrap of garlic that clung to the slotted spoon after I put everything into the jar, and I ate it and it was amazing.
Garlic confit
From The Kitchn
The basket
2 or 3 heads’ worth of garlic cloves, peeled
I used an entire carton of pre-peeled garlic and have no regrets!
Olive oil
The path
Put your garlic cloves in a small saucepan and pour enough olive oil over them to juuuust cover them. Bring the oil to the absolute slightest simmer over medium heat (seriously, the slightest simmer), then lower the heat as far as you can. Cook for ~45 minutes; the garlic should be tender, but still holding together. Use a slotted spoon to drop the garlic cloves into a clean glass jar, and pour the oil over them. Let cool, uncovered, to room temperature (70-90 degrees), then put the lid on and refrigerate. This will allegedly keep in the fridge for several weeks, but I don’t think it’ll last that long.
Garlic waffles
Adapted from Dorie Greenspan, Waffles: From Morning to Midnight
The basket
2 tbsp oil from garlic confit
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
One or two pinches of salt
1.5 tbsp sugar
1 cup milk
1 large egg
The path
Preheat the waffle iron and set aside the garlic confit oil.
In a large bowl, whisk flour, baking powder, salt and sugar. In another bowl or a large measuring up (I like to combine liquid ingredients in the measuring cups I measure them in!), whisk the milk and egg until blended thoroughly. Pour liquid ingredients over dry and whisk until just combined. Whisk in the oil.
Spray your waffle iron — thoroughly, if you’re me — and pour a 1/2 cup of batter onto the iron. Close the lid and let cook until brown and crisp. Repeat until all the batter is gone and your kitchen smells unbelievably pleasant.
Triple-Threat Onion Galette
Adapted from Bon Appétit, April 2020
The basket
Your preferred tart dough (I used a recipe from Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal, but I absolutely love Samin Nosrat’s as well)
4 tbsp unsalted butter
1 medium or large onion, thinly sliced
8 cloves of garlic confit
1.5 tsp Diamond Crystal kosher salt
12 scallions, thinly sliced on the diagonal
2 tbsp Dijon mustard
2 oz finely grated Parmesan
The path
Preheat oven to 375 with a rack in the center. Prepare a parchment paper-lined baking sheet.
Heat 3 tbsp of butter over medium heat in a medium-sized skillet until it starts to foam. Lower heat to medium-low and add onion, garlic, and 1 tsp salt. Squish the garlic cloves a little with a wooden spoon; they’ll be very tender from the confit, and burst open a bit, and smell really good. Stir to combine, and cook, uncovered, for 3 minutes. Cover for another 3, until onion starts to brown; then uncover again, occasionally stirring, until the mixture is golden brown, which will be a few more minutes. When it’s done, add the mixture to a plate or bowl.
In the skillet, melt another tablespoon of butter over medium heat. After, remove the skillet from the heat and add scallions and the other 1/2 tsp of salt. Toss scallions to coat them in butter.
Get your dough out (it should have been already rolled out to 14 inches in diameter and hanging out chilled in the fridge). Plop the mustard in the center and use a small offset spatula (or a spoon) to spread it thinly over the dough, leaving a border around the edges that should be 1.5-2 inches but for me was more like…half an inch. (It does make for a really nice taste in the crunchy galette edges.)
Plop the onion mixture onto the mustard and spread it out with the offset spatula, then sprinkle the Parmesan over top. (BA advises adding freshly ground black pepper at this stage; I completely forgot about it, and my galette was still amazing, so.)
Now make the pleats: cut from the edge of the dough to the edge of the mustard filling, and continue making slits 2-3 inches apart. Fold the pleats up and over the filling so that they overlap, then scatter the scallions (and the butter they were tossed in!) over the top.
Bake galette until the scallions are lightly charred and the crust is golden brown; this took me about 50 minutes. Let it sit for 5 minutes after taking it out of the oven, then cut into pieces and eat immediately. (Or at room temp. This will probably be great chilled, too; I’ll find out in the morning…)