Quickies: The Easy Garlic Dressing that Tastes Amazing on Everything

In our cooking series Quickies, we invite chefs, bartenders, and other personalities in the world of food and drink who are serious hustlers to share their tips and tricks for preparing quick, creative after-work meals. Every dish featured in Quickies takes under 30 minutes to make, but without sacrificing any deliciousness—these are tried-and-tested recipes for the super-busy who also happen to have impeccable taste.

Everything's better with garlic.

Well, pretty much everything.

Let's face it: Every sauce, sandwich, plate of pasta, or savory snack you can think of wouldn't be mad at a fragrant smear of the stinking rose to kick up its flavor profile a serious notch.

Recently, Victoria Blamey of West Village haunt Chumley's—which has been bestowing the Big Apple with booze, bites, and coziness since Prohibition, and recently reopened after serious renovation—came by the MUNCHIES Test Kitchen for an installment of Workaholics.

She came armed with this simple garlic dressing, a crunchy condiment that turns any old toast, sandwich, or bowl of rice-and-whatever into an umami bomb.

You've probably got most of the ingredients laying around in your pantry and fridge already (garlic, canola oil, chili flakes, paprika) but there are a few unexpected components—such as bonito flakes and hondashi powder—that may require a trip to a market with a halfway decent international foods section.

The base is the garlic, paprika, and the chili flakes. Blamey tends to be particular about her chiles. "The difference with the one I use at work is that the chili flakes from Mexico are different," she says. "Or you could do it with guajillo or something else. If you want to mix different chiles, you'll have a different flavor."

To get started, thinly slice the garlic cloves. We recommend using a mandolin, but no matter what you slice with, watch your fingers!

While you're slicing those aromatic little cloves, heat the canola oil until it's good and h-o-t. Cook the garlic slices until they're golden brown and crispy.

Tempting as it might be to snack on your newfound garlic ships, let them cool off.

If this sounds tricky, or if you only have shallots on hand in a pinch, fear not.

"If you don't want to fry garlic, which can be annoying, you could just buy fried garlic," Blamey adds. "The only thing, sometimes, is that fried garlic usually has flour to make it crispy. The same thing with shallots—if you don't use flour, you put them in the oil cold, then bring it up to the right temperature. Not the garlic, but the shallots. Just keep staring, staring, staring; then it turns the color that you want. It turns really quickly"

Next, throw together the dry ingredients…

…And let the grapeseed oil meld it all together into a lovely synthesis of salty, mouthwatering flavor.

That's it! We weren't kidding when we said that once you've got all of the elements on hand, this comes together faster than the bake time for a frozen pizza.

"To be honest with you, I adore bread. It's just easy," Blamey tells me, in terms of its applications. She recommends it on a poached egg tucked into half an avocado, served with a squeeze of lime and pita bread.

And after a taste, we certainly didn't disagree.

"I bought something like this at Sunrise Mart," she explained. "I thought it was delicious, but I felt guilty using it in a restaurant. But it's like buying mayonnaise, which people do. So I needed to come up with how to make it on my own, and just kept adjusting it."

We get to enjoy the product of her obsession (and experimentation) guilt-free. All hail garlic, the little white bulb that keeps on giving—and never gets old.