Smoked garlic

"If I am to use garlic at all in winter, it will most likely be the smoked variety. Each head is beautiful, with its gold, papery skin and cloves the colour of old parchment. The smell is ancient, a mixture of log fires and potato dauphinoise, the scent of home and hearth." Nigel Slater

I am really looking forward to French supermarkets - to checking out what they have on their shelves that we don't have here. And reading this entry in Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries today, it reminds me that every country's supermarket is different. Because I am not at all sure that I have ever seen smoked garlic on the supermarket shelves here - though he claims that in England they are - and indeed a quick search does throw up lots of recipes that use it. So I checked Australian smoked garlic on the web and indeed it is available, but it seems to be the domain of specialist suppliers. You can buy it online but I'm not sure where else you would get it. Maybe a Chinese supermarket - do they do smoked garlic? But then Nigel Slater says that it used to be the case in England that you could not find it. The enterprising try something new and before you know it you have a new vegetable - initially for the rich and later for everyone. Like potatoes.

Of course you can make your own - on a rather smaller scale than that shown above. And I did find a recipe for how to do it from Bradley Smoker - a company that makes smoking equipment. Here is the recipe:

"1 bulb garlic, ½ (cup, teaspoon, tablespoon?) olive oil, Pinch of salt

1. Cut off the very top of a the bulb of garlic to expose the top of each garlic clove 2. Rub bulb in olive oil and sprinkle top with salt 3. Place the garlic in preheated smoker at 150-165°F and smoke for approximately 1hour 3. Take the garlic out of the Smoker and wrap bulb in aluminum foil.

4. Place the bulb with garlic back in the smoker for approximately 1 more hour until cloves are soft (I like to smoke garlic whilst smoking other things at lower temperatures like sausages or fish) 5. Remove garlic from smoker and add cloves to your favourite recipes, store remaining garlic in the fridge for up to 1 week"

Now I am assuming that if you don't have a smoker, then you could use a Weber or something similar - or as in the article on smoked butter, rig something up with woks, saucepans and foil. Give it a go anyway.

Going back to Nigel Slater though. His introduction for his recipe for Potatoes with smoked garlic is so beautifully written that I make no apologies for reproducing it here. Most of it is the recipe itself - well not the recipe - that's on the next page and is much more prosaic, but here he describes himself making this very simple dish.

"The sky today is almost lavender grey. There are cold ashes in the grate. We are not warm. I peel potatoes, fat floury ones, and tuck them into a shallow cast-iron pan. I pour in olive oil, throw in sea salt, a couple of sprigs of rosemary, and let the potatoes putter away, but spend a while now and again gently spooning the oil over them. There is a pan of warm milk on the other ring, infusing with cloves of smoked garlic.

As the dish progresses I realise it is more than the accompaniment I intended it to be. On a cold, bleak day such as today, this could be a meal in itself. A slice of air-dried ham on the side, a smoked mackerel in its golden mackintosh, a wispy mop head of frisée to clean the cream from my plate.

When the potatoes have sponged up most of the oil, and are on the verge of collapse, I pour the steaming, smoked scented cream over them and serve them in deep, warm bowls."

The actual recipe gives slightly more detail like how much olive oil (a third of the way up the potatoes) + some water to almost cover them. You squeeze the smoked garlic from the skins (4 cloves for 700g potatoes), into the milk and when you have poured the cream over them you cook them a little longer - 10 minutes. Scatter parsley over the top. On the net he also has a recipe for a cauliflower cheese that uses smoked garlic.

So I've been lazy in using somebody else's words rather than my own but then they are so much better than mine. I just wish I could write like that. And I will try the recipe sometime - if I can find some smoked garlic.

As for the smell of smoke. We live in Eltham, an outer Melbourne suburb that used to be populated by hippy artists who built themselves mud=brick homes. And up to a point it still is. At least the mud-brick homes remain, and most of them have open wood fires - as do we - so there is a rather lovely smell of woodsmoke in the air in autumn and winter. Not very environmentally friendly I know - which is very curious, but in almost every other way the inhabitants of Eltham are greenies. It just shows, does it not, that when it comes down to it, we are most of us not concerned about the bigger picture - merely ourselves. And I am still not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing.

I wonder what the next smoked thing will be. I did see references to smoked salt.