This comforting take on an Italian-American favorite is a base recipe for garlic butter that can be made ahead and spread on bread to enjoy anytime — with a cheesy option too.
I was a freshman in college, a long way from home, when I devoured the best garlic bread I had ever had at Yorkside Pizza in New Haven, Conn. A new friend ordered a loaf as a study-break midnight snack and its scent reached us before it did. When it landed on our table, steam was still rising from the garlicky, cheese-smothered slabs of Italian bread. We ate it hot, catching the stretchy mozzarella strings in our mouths before biting into the butter-drenched center and crackly outer crust.
It starts with an easy from-scratch garlic butter. Mixing garlic raw into butter ends up tasting steamy, and granulated dried garlic comes on too strong and feels a little dusty, so I start by sizzling finely minced fresh cloves in olive oil.the garlic lightly first enriches it while taking off its sharp edge. You need to uniformly and finely mince the garlic so you don’t end up biting into harsh little chunks later.
The bread is just as important as the right garlickyness, both in type and how you cut it. You want a white-flour loaf with a thin crust and fluffy insides. This isn’t the place for sourdough or anything hard-crusted, chewy or grainy; get supermarket bread labeled Italian, French or Portuguese. Mexican bolillos, Vietnamese baguettes or submarine sandwich rolls work too.
Cut the loaf open through its equator from end to end, as if making a sandwich. None of this slice-the-loaf-from-top-to-bottom business. When you butter vertically cut slices, you end up with dry, tasteless rings of crust around soggy, too-intense centers. Plus, it’s a lot of hassle. With split bread canoes, you get a light crispness on the golden tops, an even richness through the centers and crackling bottom crusts that cradle the garlic butter while being flavored by it.
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