Homemade Garlic Butter

Note: I did not include the garlic roasting time for this because I use Ree’s how-to for roasting garlic, and all the info is there.

1. Squeeze all the cloves out of your freshly-roasted garlic into a small dish, making sure to get as much of the olive oil and papery husks stuck to your hands as possible because cooking is supposed to be messy, right?

2. Wash hands.

3. Notice you missed a few cloves and get those suckers out too.

4. Wash hands (again).

You should have between 8-12 cloves. Use more or less depending on how garlicky you want the butter.

Now, there’s a couple ways you can go about doing this.

The first way is a great stress reliever and involves a lot of mashing the garlic with the butter in a small dish with a fork, spoon, spatula, or other instrument of smashing, and will probably take a lot longer than the 3 minutes I’ve suggested. The result is still yummy and very edible so if you don’t have a mini food processor, this is probably the way you should do it.

The second way involves a mini food processor and is a lot easier and faster, but much less emotionally satisfying.

5. Drop the garlic cloves into the mini food processor.

6. Cut the butter into chunks and add to the processor.

7. Pulse it a few times until you realize that loaf of bread you just cut a slice off of is whimpering and then just hold the button down until the butter and garlic are melded into deliciousness, about 30 – 45 seconds.

8. Get a big smear on a knife and spread it on a piece of bread and enjoy while trying to figure out how to get every last bit out of the processor.

9. Scrape the garlic butter into a small airtight container and store for up to 3-4 days (see below).

Note: I only say this because I wouldn’t trust it past that point. To be honest, the first time I made this recipe, I only used 1/4 stick of butter and the resulting stuff was gone in less than 24 hours, so I don’t know that storage would really be an issue.

10. Take a chunk of bread and run it around inside the processor container to get the rest of the garlic butter you missed.

Things I’ve done with this garlic butter:

Spread on fresh French bread and eaten it.
Spread on fresh French bread, topped with shredded mozzarella cheese and toasted it in the oven.
Spread it on corn-tortilla cheese quesadillas fresh off the frying pan.
Spread it on corn-tortilla cheese quesadillas BEFORE putting it on the frying pan (be careful with this, the stuff burns easily).
Spread it on roasted potatoes.
Tossed it with steamed broccoli.

And that was just in the past 12 hours. I’ve run out now, time to make some more!