I found this Honeyed Garlic sauce recipe at Food 52 (it was written by Carolina Gelen @carolinagelen) and made it not once, but four times my first month. The flavors were so spot on and I kept coming up with ways to use it. Each time, I took that basic recipe and played with it more and more until I got a sauce that worked for me and the recipes I intended to use it on. The idea of honey and roasted garlic is just a great one – thanks Carolina for the inspiration. I wanted to use this as a marinade and then sauce on poultry so I knew I’d be adding more lemon and some Calabrian chilis Her original recipe used vanilla extract (love it!) but I was looking for some fall flavors and went with maple instead. One of the biggest changes I made was the amount of oil used and the type. I went with olive oil for taste and less of it to make a thicker sauce. I also completely removed the water. I wasn’t looking for a dressing but rather a marinade, sauce or glaze. This recipe mix gave me just that.
This is the perfect garlicky, sweet, lemony and slightly spicy sauce that you can put on almost anything. I love it! My favorite use of this so far has been on poultry. Chicken, turkey and cornish hens have all tasted great basted with this in the last 1/2 hour of cooking. By using the sauce first as a marinade (Let the poultry sit in the marinade for 2 hours then remove from the marinade and roast. Be sure to discard the marinade.) and then as a warm sauce (heat a fresh batch of the marinade/sauce), I doubled up the flavors. After you make this simple sauce, be sure to try it on poultry.
I then used this same sauce as a glaze for my Honey & Garlic Roasted Salmon…Fabulous! I really up the lemon in that one by serving it with additional lemon wedges on the side.
Playing with my food is what I do…being inspired by great chefs is a reason to get in the kitchen. This was a fun experiment and I got a new sauce and two new ways to use it (many more to come, I’m sure.). Hope you’ll try my version soon.
To get started on this sauce, preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Place the garlic heads, cut sides facing up, on a large sheet of foil. Drizzle each with 1 tablespoon of canola oil, then tightly wrap in the foil. Roast for one hour, until the cloves are golden brown and soft. Let cool slightly, until you can touch the cloves.
Squeeze the garlic cloves into a blender or food processor. Add all the remaining ingredients and blend until smooth. Taste and add more salt if needed until the consistency is slightly thick but still pourable.
If you like this sauce, be sure to check out some of my other multi-purpose sauces.
Roasted Veggies and Peach Salsa
Honeyed Garlic Maple Sauce
Nutritional information is only an estimate. The accuracy of the nutritional information for any recipe on this site is not guaranteed.
Ingredients
- 4 Heads of garlic medium sized and top third cut off
- 1/2 Cup Olive oil
- 3 Tbsp. Honey
- 2 Tsp. Soy sauce
- 2 Lemons squeezed lemon juice from those lemons
- 1 Tsp. Freshly ground black pepper
- 1/2 Tsp. Crushed Calabrian Chilis
- 3/4 Tsp. Kosher salt plus more to taste
- 1/4 Tsp. Maple extract
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
- Place the garlic heads, cut sides facing up, on a large sheet of foil. Drizzle each with 1 tablespoon of canola oil, then tightly wrap in the foil. Roast for one hour, until the cloves are golden brown and soft. Let cool slightly, until you can touch the cloves.
- Squeeze the garlic cloves into a blender or food processor. Add all the remaining ingredients and blend until smooth. Taste and add more salt if needed until the consistency is slightly thick but still pourable.
