Garlic – Does Roasted Garlic Leave No Aftertaste and Smell?

I have had great results by taking individual garlic cloves and cutting the root end off each, but leaving them in their papery skins.

Then you put those dry into a small saucepan (ideally one with a thick bottom) over low-to-medium heat. Put a lid on it, and let it go for 20 minutes or so, shaking vigorously every couple of minutes to turn the cloves over. When the cloves are really soft, you're done.

The paper skins protect the garlic cloves from burning, but the direct contact with the hot pan cooks them nicely. When you're done you can squeeze the soft, roasted garlic goodness out of the root end of the skins. This is a particularly nice technique when you want roasted garlic flavor but only need a few cloves, not a whole head.

The first time I did a recipe that called for this process, I was sure the garlic would scorch or the skins would catch fire, but it worked great.

As covered on wikipedia, raw garlic has a number of sulfur-containing compounds, among them allicin, which are responsible for the burning feeling raw garlic imparts to a dish. When cooked into food, these flavors mellow and the compounds are boiled off or denatured. Other enzymatic and non-enzymatic transformative and browning processes also take place as garlic is cooked.

Roasting garlic produces these changes in garlic before-hand, and in a more controlled way. As the garlic heats up and starts browning, the raw garlic character is lost, while sweetness from melanoidin (a product of the reaction of amino acids with sugar, per the Maillard reaction) and savoryness (from the denaturing, concentrating amino acid content) are gained. The extreme example of this is Black Garlic (discussed at some length on my blog), in which the sweet and savory content of the garlic has been processed and concentrated over the course of a month, with the flavor resembling non-sour Balsamic vinegar.

With that said, the inclusion of raw or pre-processed garlic will depend on the proportions of the two above-noted sets of flavors that are desired in a dish. If added raw to uncooked food, it will add very little savory or sweet, and plenty of aroma and burn. If added roasted to that same food, it will add mostly savory and sweet, with very little of the burn. Any further cooking that takes place after garlic's addition to a recipe will further discourage the raw flavors and aromas.