Garlic Knots
Having lived in New York City for over 18 years, I've eaten my fair share of garlic knots, but to be honest, they were never really my thing. I do love a good garlic knot, but I mainly got them when either I wasn't sure if I was going to need another full slice of pizza, or when I was ordering for a crowd and wanted a side with our pizzas. Since they were almost an afterthought for me while in New York, it's no wonder they've never been at the top of my to-do list for home cooking. However, they rose to that position when I decided to throw a NY-style pizza party last fall and the menu definitely would not have been complete without these glistening, garlicky little orbs.
I always kind of assumed garlic knots were invented as way to use up spare dough that would have normally gone to waste, so the place to start when making them was with a New York-style pizza dough. I took a combo of the recipes from Serious Eats and Sip & Feast to get to the exact dough I made and since I was cooking for a large crowd this day, I utilized my food processor to speed up the dough formation. I ended up overloading my 14-cup capacity machine trying to do a double recipe at once, but it still worked out okay, the dough just needed a little extra hand kneading once it started to be too much for the motor to handle.
One reason New York pizza, and garlic knots, are so good is because the dough is often cold fermented. This is merely letting it sit in the fridge for at least a day, which is a step I wouldn't skip. To me, that downtime also means it's not too big of a task to add a little more to the final recipe, and for these garlic knots, I decided to make a marinara for dipping from a simple recipe I've used many, many times over the years.
While the marinara is optional, making the glaze for the knots is not. The rest of the recipe I took from Sip & Feast because James's process seemed the most well researched and developed and I didn't think there was anything for me to really improve upon. His glaze is a 50/50 mix of extra-virgin olive oil and butter in which a ton of minced garlic is simmered until it just begins to brown. This ensures the fat has a pretty extreme garlicky flavor while the actual garlic doesn't have that harsh raw garlic taste.
About two hours before I planned to cook the knots, I removed the dough from the fridge and then an hour prior I started to get my KettlePizza heated up. When it was at my target temp of between 600-650°F, I took a piece of dough and did my best to try to stretch it out by hand into a roughly 12-inch square.
I wasn't able to get it that exact shape, but it was pretty easy to feel if I was cutting off enough dough for each knot. As I cut small rectangles of dough, I lightly stretched each piece a little longer before tying it in a knot. When I had some excess dough hanging out, I merely tucked it under so it wasn't loose anymore. In the end, I got 18 knots per dough ball.
Where my process begins to differ is the use of the KettlePizza to cook the knots. I thought this was going to be a cinch, but after losing nearly half the knots in my first batch, I realized it wasn't as straightforward as I thought it would be. First, the knots that were closer to the back of the oven burned before the ones near the front browned, and unlike a pizza that's easy to turn for even cooking, the knots don't play that game. So I adjusted in subsequent cooks by putting less knots in at once and trying to position them all in a line that was halfway between the front and back of the pizza stone.
The other problem I didn't foresee was when I went to retrieve the knots, they were so light that the peel ended up shoving half of them off the stone and into the fire. I fixed this by using the peel just to get the knots into the oven, but then used extra-long tongs, while also wearing welding gloves, to get the knots out. After I fixed those two issues, every knot from then on came out of the oven. Some looked like they were a little too charred, but they actually all ended up tasting great.
A good reason for that was because the coating on the knots was so irresistible. They got doused in that rich glaze, but also were adorned with parsley, red pepper flakes, and Pecorino Romano. There's so many strong flavors in that combo that some charred bits felt like they just added to party instead of taking away from it.
These were probably some of the best garlic knots I've ever had. It may be because they were as fresh as can be, but New York garlic knots sometimes feel like a gut bomb, where these felt lighter with a much brighter flavor that definitely would not have made them a second-string side in my mind if they all tasted like this. Now I think it'll be hard for me not to toss some knots into the oven each time I'm making pizza because I don't think I could get enough of these!
