Easy Roasted Garlic for your Freezer

I love garlic, possibly more than any other food, except maybe chocolate. It can make any dish taste better, it can boost your immune system, and it is so easy to grow.

We like it so much that last year we grew about 150 heads.

As spring rolls around and temperatures are rising, our cold storage isn’t quite cold enough any more to keep the heads from beginning to sprout; we have about 60 heads left. We took about 20 of those heads and split them up and planted them so we can harvest “green garlic” but we didn’t want to lose our garlic for cooking between now and July’s harvest.

Roasting and freezing the cloves was the perfect solution to preserving them for a few more months. As a bonus, our house smelled amazing while we were roasting :)

Here is the easy five-step-process we followed:

Place a large piece of foil on a cookie sheet and drizzle with olive oil.
Separate and peel your cloves, place on the foil, and drizzle again with olive oil (generously!); close up the foil into a packet.
Roast at 425 degrees for about 40-50 minutes, or until easily mashed.
Remove from the oven and let cool slightly, then mash with a fork.
Gather up the garlic and excess oil and freeze in small containers (ice cube trays work great - you can easily a cube of garlic to add to a soup, stew, or stir fry!). You can also add more olive oil at this point to completely cover the mashed garlic, if necessary.