Delicious, perfectly “roasted” and caramelized garlic in just 5 minutes under pressure and 5 more under the broiler – not an hour in the oven!
The folks who published Modernist Cuisine shared a technique from their book online that involves filling a jar with garlic cloves, covering them in olive oil to then pressure cook for two hours.
I don’t have the patience to peel 30 cloves of garlic nor the time to pressure cook a jar for two hours. The pressure cooker should make things faster.
To roast garlic in the oven I would slice off the top, drizzle it with a little olive oil, wrap it in a layer of oven paper and aluminum foil, close it tightly and toss it in – but only when I already had a lasagna or focaccia going.
The pressure cooker can steam the garlic, much like the little oven packet, but in the short time, the garlic softens the cloves cannot caramelize. Enter my favorite pressure cooking partner: the broiler. A quick blast of this intense heat is enough to get the oil to the business of sizzling and caramelizing.
The result: perfectly roasted garlic in about 20 minutes (start to plate), with very little effort and big time and energy savings!
| Pressure Cooker | Accessories | Pr. Cook Time | Pr. Level | Open |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 L or larger | steamer basket | 5-6 min. | High(2) | Natural |
- 3 large garlic bulbs
- drizzle extra virgin olive oil (the good stuff)
- 1 cup water
- Prepare the pressure cooker with water and steamer basket and set aside.
- Slice off the top ¼ of the garlic bulbs - reserving the tips that should now pop out of the skin for a future recipe.
- Place bulbs in the pressure cooker steamer basket.
- Close and lock the pressure cooker. Turn the heat up to high and when the cooker reaches pressure, lower to the heat to the minimum needed to maintain pressure.
- Close the lid and set the valve to pressure cooking position.
- Electric pressure cookers: Cook for 6 minutes at high pressure.
Stove top pressure cookers: Lock the lid, and cook for 5 minutes at high pressure. - When time is up, open the pressure cooker with the Natural pressure release.
Electric pressure cookers: Disengage the “keep warm” mode, or unplug the cooker, and open the lid when the pressure indicator/lid-lock has gone down (about 15 minutes).
Stovetop pressure cookers: Move the cooker off the burner and wait for the pressure to come down on its own (about 10 minutes). - With tongs, carefully remove the hot, soft garlic bulbs and place on
heat-safe dish. - Drizzle with olive oil in all the nooks and crannies and broil for 5 minutes, or until sufficiently golden and caramelized.
- Serve!
Can I just say how life-changing this website has been for me? First you tell me I can peel an egg perfectly, then you got me to make jam, now I can have roasted garlic right-now?!?!
I had no idea my pressure cooker was so versitile until I accidentaly clicked on a link somewhere – can’t find you in a google search for the life of me. But so glad that I’ve been let “in” to all of your secrets.
My pressure cooker hasn’t been the same!
Laaar,
Oh, wow. Thank you!
Ciao,
L
I found the easiest way to peel an egg is to run under hot water to expand the shell. Use a teaspoon.. crack roundest end of egg where the air space is. Keep egg under running water as you use the spoon to slide between the shell and egg. Works every time!
What a FANTASTIC idea! I am totally going to try this!
Let me know how you like it! And send me a link to share if you blog about it!
Ciao,
L
What a pretty “flower”! I would never have guessed you could get this result in a pressure cooker.
Speaking of pretty, I love the new look for your blog. Complimenti!
Ciao Frank,
I can tell you are a garlic lover- unlike most Italians which add the “essence” of garlic and then toss away the clove! My mother-in-law thought I was nuts when I wanted to eat it. My husband was incredulous until I introduced him to the joys of roasted garlic. My entire first test bulb disappeared while I went to pick-up my kids from school – he liked it!
It was the re-design of your blog that inspired mine! I wanted to switch to “blogger views” but I both liked and didn’t like that it removed most of the clutter. So I thought about what information people might want the most (recipes) along with the ability to promote more recipes “above the fold”. It’s not “perfect” but it will do for now until I have time to make the big move to a website not hosted by blogger -maybe in a year or two!
Ciao,
L
This is amazing! I LOVE garlic and melt at the taste of roasted garlic, so having roasted garlic in 20 minute! How can I NOT test this out! WOW!
MJ, how did you like it?
Ciao,
L
Roasted garlic, the REAL way to eat garlic or add to a recipe. Your site is marvelous. I have used a PC for 35plus years but now I can REALLY use my beloved Pressure Cooker.
Grandma Spicy, I love it… pressure cooking is the “real way” to cook!!
Ciao,
L
Laura, is it possible for a pressure cooker to remove the smell from garlic?
I love the taste of garlic in food, especially Italian dishes, but the odour stays in my breath for days!
Great website. In one word: perfect. :)
Thank you for the advice, I will give that a try next time I eat something with garlic.
Stainless steel is meant to cure the smell of many things on the skin, which anyone can do by rubbing their hands on a stainless steel kitchen tap, but nobody knows exactly how it works.
Maybe as an experiment, see if pressure cooking garlic for long enough will remove the odour completely and retain the nutrients of the garlic? How long would it need to be pressure cooked in order to remove the odour – but without being too overcooked? If you find a way of doing this, I look forward to seeing the results on here.
Generally cooked garlic does not have such a long-lasting effect and impact as fresh. I wouldn’t say it removes the smell, but it does have a more delicate flavor that hangs around for a lot less time than fresh.
BTW, a way to get rid of the most harsh fresh garlic taste in your mouth is to wipe a small stainless steel spoon on your tongue and around your mouth. I don’t know why, but the chemical reaction seems to neutralize that strong flavor.
Ciao,
L
I did read somewhere that cooking garlic for 20 – 30 minutes at 15 psi can remove the odour. Maybe it could work at 13 psi for around 35 minutes? I am guessing that means using the natural release method as well, as is common for recipes with long cooking times? I have cooked chilli con carne in a pressure cooker and the onions go nice and soft and don’t give me bad breath.
If you (or anyone reading) wants to experiment with garlic, it would be very interesting to see if pressure cooking garlic cloves for long enough really does remove the stink, but not the flavour!
I am glad the website is back again. :) Please don’t let them take it away again Laura. I am most grateful for your work and time that goes into making this website. Thank you ever so much.
This was my second recipe I [mostly] followed from this site…another winner for sure! I already had peeled garlic cloves and I only needed some to make a garlic pizza sauce. It worked out great! The only thing I might do differently next time is put the garlic closer to the broiling element.
But the real take away for me was combining this method with the method for cooking salmon in the pressure cooker. I had a super thick fillet and salted and pressure cooked it in the steamer basket for a total of 8 minutes following the guidelines on the timing tables (obviously I increased the time). Then I put the salmon on a foil covered baking pan, coated it with maple syrup and sprinkled a generous amount of Tajin, which is a Mexican chili and lime powder usually sprinkled on fruit like mango (which is amazing). I broiled the salmon for 5 minutes. I had another piece of salmon, a lot thinner, and did the same thing all over again, but pressure cooked it only 5 minutes. My husband said the salmon was excellent. I had to agree. I served it with with a salad topped with sea salt and cracked pepper sliced almonds and homemade vinaigrette, and with home made bread. It was one of the best meals I’ve ever made and one of the quickest!
Thank you again for great pressure cooker recipes and ideas!
I just did this but the garlic heads didn’t open up or “bloom” the way yours did. Should I have clipped the sides?
Excellent question. In fact, I did not write in the recipe that after broiling, if you like, you can tug and tear the skin of the external cloves to make the garlic “bloom”!
Ciao,
L
I adore this site! My mom gave me my grandmother’s pressure cooker thinking I would use it to can. Instead, it’s made me an actual cook! I love it! Thank you!
WHY do you need a 5L pressure cooker for this?
You may not.
But keep in mind these are steamed. That means you need room for the steamer basket and its legs. Then the garlic bulbs will sit on to of that. And still stay below the magic 2/3 level. If you can achieve all that in your pressure cooker you will be fine. I know they won’t fit in my 2.5l PC. For that matter it is a stretch in my 5l frypan style, even with the super low Kuhn Rikon trivet.
Omg!!! You totally saved my day! I didn’t read my recipe ahead and it called for whole roasted cloves of garlic!! Thank goodness for you and my pressure cooker. I was able to shave 45 minutes off my cook time and it was delish!
Ok, even though I LOVE Garlic, I have no idea of how to use it roasted. How do you get it out of the cloves? What do you use it on? I have a very large bag of garlic right now, and it’s time to use them up. Ideas would be appreciated Thanks
You can tug them out of the wrapper with a butter knife and spread directly onto bread. Or, you can squeeze it out into a recipe – such as a soup or sauce as needed. The “roasted” cloves are very soft and pliable. Use anywhere you would use fresh garlic – but with a softer, “darker” flavor.
Ciao,
L
You can also use your pressure cooker to make garlic “confit” per the recipe in Modernist Cuisine. You put the peeled garlic in mason jars, cover with olive oil and add whatever seasonings you want, then pressure cook. The result is very similar to roasted garlic, and you can put the whole mason jar in the fridge. It will keep for a very long time but MUST be refrigerated. This also eliminates the problem of your pressure cooker smelling like garlic. It’s not as pretty as what you show here but it’s genius in many ways!
Welcome Melanie,
Laura actually references the MC recipe in her intro (and provides a link). Then complains she is too impatient for it. When DadCooksDinner posted it, he had to take it down because he was inundated with people complaining it wasn’t safe.
Personally I like the MC one better than Laura’s so that is the one I use. I usually have a jar in the fridge as I use it to make aioli fairly regularly.
This sounds wonderful, but I am new to the world of pressure cooking and I have an instant pot. I am little confused about cooking at highest temp and then changing to lowest temp to maintain pressure. I am not sure I can change the temperatures. Can you help me with the steps? Thanks
Welcome Saluces,
This is an old recipe from before Laura went electronic. Those directions refer to a stovetop pressure cooker.
Your InstantPot manages it all for you Just set it for 6 minutes and forget it until it beeps.
I have updated the instructions in this recipe to include electric pressure cookers. Thanks! ; )
Ciao,
L
Thank you so much for updating recipe and I really look forward to your website also thanks Greg
Thank you and look forward to enjoying your website/blog
Hello! So happy I found this site- no idea how :) I have a regular stove-top pressure cooker that until just yesterday, had only been used to cook tough meat. Yesterday, I made hard boiled eggs!! Looking forward to exploring more now that I found you. Next up- roasted garlic!
I did this with the garlic for 20min in the instant pot and I found the garlic was bland and tastless. Could the garlic have been to young? I know it was not old as it did not have the green stems inside the means its older garlic. What could have gone wrong do you think? thanks
This recipe takes 20 minutes from start to finish. You should have only pressure cooked your garlic for 5 minutes.
Ciao,
L
Anyone else find #4 and #5 confusing? It says to put the lid on and close it twice. Can I get some clarification please? Thank you
I made this recipe today using my instant pot 9 in 1. I used very spicy purple stripe hardneck garlic that I grew myself. I did a total of 8 large heads and rather than 6 minutes on high pressure I did 5 minutes because I don’t like my roasted garlic to be mushy. As the recipe instructs, I turned off the keep warm function and as soon as the pressure pin dropped down, I used tongs to move the garlic out of the instant pot and onto a baking pan, poured some good olive oil over the cut off tips and added some fresh cracked black pepper. I put it under the broiler for about 5 minutes, until it was nice and brown and caramelized .
Once done I squeezed it on some really good french bread that was already warm and buttered . I put a ton of garlic on each piece of bread because I really, really like garlic. I used about two entire heads of garlic, not individual cloves, but entire heads on each slice of bread. That would be about 12 cloves per piece of bread.
The result was incredibly disappointing. The garlic had almost no flavor at all and was very wet and waterlogged.
I think the problem is that the water under pressure creates so much steam in the pressure cooker that it just saturated the garlic and washed out the flavor. even though there was plenty of space between the bottom of the rack and the water level, the garlic definitely got washed out of flavor and way too wet. Next time I will wrap the heads of garlic in aluminum foil or put them in a covered bowl so water can’t get into the pockets of the individual cloves of garlic. Perhaps reducing the water from one cup to 1/2 a cup might also help. The other option might be to use one rack on top of the other so the garlic is further away from the water on the bottom. I’ll experiment with different ways but as the recipe is currently written my results was garlic that had almost no flavor and was incredibly wet and soggy. I have plenty of that same garlic leftover from last growing season and it is very firm, and very strong in taste still so there was no problem with the the garlic that I used, it is very potent and flavorful, the loss of flavor all happened during the cooking. The water left in the bottom of the instant pot had an incredibly strong smell of garlic so instead of pouring it out I added it to my pasta cooking water which gave my pasta a nice garlic flavored kick so it wasn’t a complete waste at least the water what’s strong with garlic flavor and that was a nice touch to my pasta.
The garlic bulbs are supposed to be on a steamer rack – not boiled in the water.
Ciao,
L
Thank you very much for this easy roasted garlic recipe.
I pressure cooked the garlic as directed then squeezed the garlic out because I was planning to make garlic soup.
I mashed the garlic pulp, drizzled with olive oil, and broiled.
I added caramelized onions, fresh herbs, red pepper flakes, and some salt. Before heating the stock I tasted.
Wow! What a treat. I’m not sure if I’ll make the soup or not.
My only mistake was not checking the photos for how to trim the garlic. It would have been easier with a bit more trimmed off.
I wonder if rubbing olive oil into my finger tips before squeezing the garlic from the cloves would have made it easier to clean the garlic stains from under my nails.
I’ve been following the first half of this recipes for awhile. Instead of chopping and adding fresh garlic to most recipes I put several whole unpeeled cloves on top when pressure cooking. After opening pressure cooking I remove the cloves and squeeze the garlic into the broth and stir. Otherwise I believe the garlic flavor all exits with the steam.
Thanks again.
Step 5 seems to be redundant