Your Secret Ingredients For The Ultimate Stuffed Garlic Bread

Ever feel like when you get garlic bread in a store or in a restaurant, and it tastes kind of underwhelming? There’s barely enough garlic spread (which is simply just butter-flavored shortening), and it bakes up as flavorless as a cardboard box! Sorry I’ll pass. When you think about it, garlic bread has to be sumptuous and seasoned with a hefty amount of garlic and has actual fat (no substitutions for real deal butter!). Well, there’s a tastier option that’s still easy to make, the secret ingredients of this stuffed garlic bread are sweeter than you think, and will it will ultimately change the way you make your next garlic bread.

These boules of round bread cut crosswise and then unapologetically jam-packed with filling are trendy for a reason. There’s nothing tricky with this recipe, it gets double the deliciousness from cream cheese and butter, and there’s nothing light about this bread, but honestly, has garlic bread ever been a diet food?

This recipe shows the start-to-finish process of making bread from scratch, but luckily we can cut out this step and buy those small round Italian boules hiding out in our supermarket’s local bakery department.

So here’s where this garlic bread gets funky because the bread has secret ingredients to make it taste that much better – something sweet. There is a bit of sweetness in both the cream cheese filling and the butter sauce, with two tablespoons of sugar in the cream cheese mixture, two tablespoons of condensed milk, and one tablespoon of honey in the garlic mixture. Now, these ingredients might sound weird, and to me, it sounds downright bizarre to have any of these components meddling in a savory bread, but these three tiny additions of sugar are perfect and make the natural garlic flavor shine.

When garlic is slowly baked, it becomes fragrant and sweet. These secret ingredients aren’t new to the savory world of cooking, many chefs use sugar to heighten the sweetness of not-so-perfect tomatoes or use honey to balance any overpowering notes of spicy and earthy flavors.

Softening the cream cheese to room temperature is crucial for a smooth consistency, once the filling is mixed, put the filling in a pastry bag or a plastic storage bag to to pipe it into the bread.

Next, the butter is melted with the garlic, condensed milk, salt, honey, parsley, and egg, and again you may be thinking — wait, wait, wait, those ingredients? On bread? Trust me. The condensed milk and egg give the garlic butter sauce a thick, smooth, velvety consistency that’s full of deep garlic flavor.

You only need to bake the bread at 320 degrees F for 10 minutes to get phenomenal results — crispy bread on the outside and creamy, gooey on the inside.

This garlic bread is so versatile you can add all types of mix-ins. To give the bread a spicy flavor add jalapenos or for the perfect cheese pull, add extra cheese like fontina or mozzarella — the sky’s the limit with what you can add to this bread!