So, let’s say you happen to be lucky enough to still have a bunch of heads of garlic from the growing season. Unlikely, we know, but that’s the situation we’ve found ourselves in.
In years past, we’ve shown you different long term preservation methods for garlic, such as making delicious Toum sauce. But, this year, we need to bulk out our spice department with some dried garlic!
You know it’s time to preserve those garlic heads based on one of a few things. Either they start growing again and you get green tails, they dry up completely or they start getting a little orange in color. Any of these signs mean you imminently need to preserve as this degradation will just continue to happen.
Dehydration is quite simple, with us preferring to utilize our dehydrator for this task. We do minimally chop our garlic prior to dehydration, just to speed up the drying time and create a bit more drying consistency. With garlic, it’s generally best to minimize the amount of cutting/prep you do prior to the drying process. Fresh garlic loses potency the more you process it, so drying first and then grinding it up is best.
Once your garlic is sufficiently dry and your house is smelling deliciously garlicky, we generally prefer to make garlic powder from it. (Though, you may want to reserve some for making dried garlic granules.) Like we showed you with some of our dried onions last year, using a spice/coffee grinder is the way to go here. Things like blenders and even food processors have troubles getting things into powder form, but that high speed coffee grinder will make short work of it.
This garlic powder can be used a number of ways. You can obviously keep it as-is, using it just like any other garlic powder. But, you can also combine it with natural salt to make your own garlic salt. (Start with a 2:1 ratio, salt to garlic powder.) You can get all fancy, of course, and use it in a number of spice mixes like taco seasoning, Italian seasoning or even your very own custom “house seasoning.” Garlic powder is a pillar in a majority of spice mixes!
If you have multiple types of garlic, there’s no problem with combining them for this process. While it’s nice to get the subtleties of variety flavors when it’s fresh, combining them will give you well rounded, robust flavor for your long term preservation. If you’re a purist, and have sufficient quantities, you can certainly make boutique single variety spice mixes too!
You might wonder why we put in all this work? Well, it’s primarily to make sure our garlic gets used up entirely with little to no waste. We also don’t necessarily trust “big food” to use high quality, super flavorful and highly cared for garlic like we can. But, it’s also because we are becoming more invested in processing our own foods and ensuring that we minimize our intake of things like preservatives and things that should not be in our food. Back to the basics, as it were.
Hopefully you’ve been enjoying our intermittent mid-winter garden preservation series! We’ll likely have a bit more to say as we start to get into our early 2025 season planning, so we’ll be around again soon!
