Sous Vide Garlic Confit

Sous Vide Garlic Confit is the perfect addition to everything from pizza to pasta to toast and only requires two ingredients.

My favourite pizza topping, next to ALL the cheese, is garlic confit. Today, I'm bringing it to you sous vide style, for my #sousvidesundayseries, with this Sous Vide Garlic Confit. It's one of those things that is ridiculously simple, but absolutely delicious and really doesn't require a recipe, per se.

We love it on all the things from toast to pizza to meat. This being Halloween weekend, loads of garlic seem appropriate.

If you follow my insta-stories over on Instagram, you would have caught my behind-the-scene making of this glorious condiment about a month ago. You would have also caught me dropping one of the jars, as I removed it, and burning myself. But that's life in the kitchen with me...

We always keep a batch on hand, because we are both serious garlic lovers. If you are a garlic-lover and have never made it, you need to change that STAT! It's awesome with roasted or mashed potatoes and most other side dishes, great with pasta and is the base of most of the pizzas we (read: the Dude) make around here.

Having always made it in the oven, it was time to try it sous vide.

Sous Vide Garlic Confit requires only two ingredients - garlic (duh!) and fat - but you can also add fresh herbs and a pinch of salt, if you like. We normally use olive oil or avocado oil to make it, but this time we used duck fat. Mainly because we had some on hand from the batch we made around Thanksgiving, but also, it is super flavourful. We also added some fresh thyme.

The completed confit imparts an irresistible mellow, sweet, nutty flavour. You can use the melt-in-your-mouth garlic and oil together, or separately. You can also replace fresh garlic with confit in your cooking.

Not familiar with confit?

French for preserved, confit is a process of slow cooking and storing food in fat. The food is cooked at low temperature for a long period, which makes it the perfect candidate for sous vide. However, you do not need a sous vide, or any special equipment, to make confit. So, grab a few heads of garlic, heat your oven to 250º and get cooking!

Not a fan of garlic? You can make confit with other vegetables (peppers, onions, squash etc.), or meat (most popular being duck, as well as turkey and tough cuts).

The photo directly above shows the confit in its first hour of cooking. The one directly below shows the confit at four hours.

Sweet Tips for Sous Vide Garlic Confit Success:

• You may cook the garlic whole, but I am not a fan of the messy extraction. So, I peel and peel and peel with the knowledge that the end result will most certainly be worth it.
• Ensure your mason jars are well cleaned, or sanitized, so as not to risk contamination.
• When sealing the mason jar, do not tighten the lid all the way - this may cause the glass to crack. You want to close it tight enough so that water does not get it, but where it requires little effort to unscrew the lid with your finger tips. Or, you can skip the jar and cook in a ziplock bag, using the water displacement method. See my past #sousvidesundayseries posts.
• Under certain conditions, garlic can produce bacteria spores that cause botulism, so it is extremely important to immediately cool the confit in its jar in a ice bath after cooking and keep it refrigerated. Check out this post for more information.
• No sous vide? No problem! Simply add garlic and oil to a heat-proof dish and cook for 2-3 hours at 250F.
• Confit may be stored in the refrigerator in an airtight container for up to two months, but it never lasts that long around here and I never keep it for more than a couple weeks.