Saturday, March 07, 2009

Preserving last season's garlic harvest

I harvested too much garlic last year.
Gave it away to good cooks in the family, planted cloves from the best heads (last September), used (still using) plenty of fresh in cooking, and I even did that little whey fermentation experiment with a quart of those cloves.
But I still have garlic in my garage.
And spring is coming.

So yesterday I dragged out the trusty dehydrator.
I cleaned, peeled and chopped about three layers of garlic cloves and dried them for about 6 hours. With a little cheapo dehydrator like this one, as the food dries you need to watch it occasionally to make sure it stays nice - move it around a bit to distribute the hot spots. I consolidated the 3 layers into one for a final round.
It dried down to about a third of it's size.



Today I ground it into a powder.
Use a coffee grinder - I have three - one for coffee beans, one for dried green herbs, and the third for spicy things like spices, peppers and now, garlic. I ground a little kosher salt in the first batch thinking it would aid the grinder by adding a little tooth... but saw I didn't need to do that - just add the salt (if you want garlic salt) at bottling. Very little salt is in this product, but I thought it might keep the powder from clumping later on.



This Stuff is Good.
I Know How It Was Grown and Processed.
And It is a Thrifty Use for those smaller cloves of fresh garlic that won't keep their quality for much longer.
If I can do it, you can do it!

4 comments:

Helen/patientgardener said...

Fancy having too much garlic - if only!!

CanadianGardenJoy said...

Betsy I haven't done garlic yet, well in a good many years .. I do a lot of rosemary and thyme .. dill and fennel. I love jarring air dried herbs in the Fall .. the smell on my hands reminds me of summer all over again !
Love your machine girl !!

Anonymous said...

Oh you make your own garlic powder. Garlic does make a difference in cooking. Thanks for sharing this.

I'm So Pretty said...

what a great idea!!!