How do Italian restaurants make that gorgeous garlic bread that makes me go mmmmmm....aaaaarrrrlllllllgggghhhh like Homer?

[LowLevelBahHumbug]

I know I can never get it quite as good in a domestic oven, but we've done Jamie Oliver's dough recipe and it's good enough. BUT. if I just mix up butter and garlic for the top it's not the same as in a restaurant! The butter tends to disappear into the dough and the garlic burns. hmmm.

How do they do it? Is it some chemical magic not available to people who don't have woodburning ovens?

So are all the italian restaurant chefs actually working instead of MNing?

I'm intrigued too as have never been able to replicate it. I'm guessing they use oil instead of butter?

We need some insiders! (spose they're all cooking for Christmas dos tho)

Yoo hoo, Italian chefs and their accomplices! Where are yooo?

I am not sure what italian garlic bread specifically you are referring to - do you mean the flat stuff? I don't really have a recipe for that, but can highly recommend my approach to making garlic bread using a french loaf:

Slice your french loaf into thick slices, without actually cutting all the way through. Put the french bread on a large piece of tinfoil.

For the garlic butter, soften some butter with a healthy dose of fresh, chopped garlic to taste (be generous). Add a little salt and, crucially, a good squirt of lemon juice. If you want to be posh, also add some finely chopped parsley.

Spread the butter mixture generously on both sides of each slice of bread then fold the tinfoil over so that the bread is completely wrapped up. Pop in the oven at 180 for about 10 minutes then loosen the tinfoil, exposing the top of the bread, and pop back in the oven for another 3 minutes or so (basically, want it to be hot already when you loosen the foil - the last few minutes is to make it crispy on top). This is the most delicious garlic bread ever. You can make it more interesting by inserting thin slices of feta cheese on each piece too.

If you wanted to do it with flat breads of some sort, I'd use the same butter/lemon/salt/garlic/parsley mixture, but put it in a lower temp oven.

The tinfoil/lower temperature is what stops the whole thing from cooking too fast or the garlic burning.