We’re complete garlic addicts in our house – baby and older children included! We love the wonderful flavour that it imparts to everything it’s added to – and it’s good to know that it provides lots of health benefits too!
If you and your family love garlic as much as we do, then something you MUST try is roasting garlic at home. The taste of roasted garlic is sublimely buttery and mellow… in fact, it’s so good, we eat it ‘neat’, straight from the oven!
Now, we don’t recommend that you feed your baby roasted garlic all by itself, but there are LOTS of other ways you can use it to really give your little one’s food a boost of flavour…
- Spread a little on to a piece of toast, or a toasted whole wheat bagel.
- Stir into mashed potato.
- Combine with natural yogurt and use as a topping for baked potato.
- Toss with cooked pasta and olive oil.
- Mix with cream cheese, or stir into other dips and spreads.
- Stir into gravy.
- Add to basic veggie purees.
- Stir into soups, stews and casseroles.
NOTE: You may be thinking that our family must smell awful after tucking into all that garlic! The good news is that roasting garlic actually breaks down the compounds responsible for the strong smell, lending a sweetness to the finished product instead. It’s not ‘aroma-free’, but it’s much less pungent than you might think.
Oven Roasted Garlic Recipe
Preheat the oven to 350 deg F (180 deg C).
Assemble as many bulbs of garlic as you want to roast.
Remove the loose layers of skin from the garlic but leave the skins on the individual cloves.
Taking a very sharp knife, slice off the tops of the cloves so that the garlic flesh is exposed.
Leave to stand for 10 minutes – this allows the anti-oxidants in the garlic to develop.
Place each garlic bulb in a ramekin, then drizzle with olive oil, making sure that each bulb is thoroughly coated.
Place in the oven and bake for around 40 mins, until the cloves feel nice and soft.
Note: The tops of the cloves go a little brown. Some people like to wrap the bulbs in foil to prevent this, but we think they taste better when roasted ‘open’.
Cool, then squeeze out the creamy garlic with your fingers!
To save energy…
Either roast the garlic bulb alongside something you were already cooking, or roast several bulbs simultaneously. You can either save the excess in the fridge for 2 or 3 days, or freeze them for future use (squeeze the garlic out of the skins before freezing).
If YOU have any more great ideas for using roasted garlic, then please do let us know!