I am annoyed at every grocery retailer in town. REALLY ANNOYED! I love garlic and I love to cook with garlic. Now of course there are many garlic options in the grocery store you can buy whole cloves of garlic peeled and in a jar, it’s a great convenience but they tend to go bad prematurely and are a bit expensive. There are even glass containers of already pressed/minced garlic and they come mostly packed in oil. This is a nice substitute to have around and has a pretty good shelf life. Then there is the “FRESH” garlic and the root of all my anger. Every store in town that I purchase garlic from has ripped me off by selling me crap that is growing. When I pick garlic out I tear back some of the paper and look for little green nubs protruding from the cloves this tells me that the garlic is growing and will taste bitter which is not at all what one is looking for in their cooking. I will even smell the head of garlic looking for the foul smell of garlic going bad. So I am relatively picky which one would think comes in pretty handy, but in fact it does not. I have gotten home many times and within two day had my garlic turn to crap. In my last garlic adventure my local Kroger didn’t have any bulk garlic so I bought one of those “organic” packages that contains 3-4 small heads of garlic. HAHAHAHAHH! Upon opening the package I found that two of the heads were molded. I did return this package to the store for a full refund.
And that brings us to the day I bought an OMG amount of garlic. My local warehouse club had these very large packages of garlic upon inspection I found them to be nice tight heads of a fairly decent size, they smelled good and they didn’t appear to be growing. It was ~$3 or so which didn’t seem like to much to pay if I could actually get some decent garlic for a change. But what does one do with this much garlic?
Well step on is to google for proper methods of preserving garlic. Wow! That was a learning experience. First interesting find is that storing garlic in oil is a no-no. Garlic contains bacteria and olive oil is not acidic enough to prevent growth. You can store in oil short term in the fridge but this is not the type of solution we are looking for. You can pickle – ewe! Then there is freezing, roasting, and drying which in fact are the options I have chosen.
—-Roasting Garlic
Roasting garlic is one of the best smelling things you will ever do in your kitchen. It is amazing. Normally I would only roast a single head as it would be enough for any recipe. But I have a lot here and need to preserve it. So I cut the tops off of 4 heads of garlic, drizzle them with olive oil and sprinkle them with salt. Here they are ready for the oven.
After about an hour they were roasted and ready to cool down on the counter. One they were cool enough to handle I squished the golden brown goodness from the paper and placed them into little containers bound for the freezer.
—-Dehydrating Garlic
Apparently dehydrating garlic keeps all of its healthy benefits and antioxidants. So why not I say. After a little pondering I determine that I want to slice the garlic cloves and place them in my dehydrator. HAHAHAH! First you have to peel all the cloves and the smack them with a knife is not an option you want to make pretty slices. Next the little guys are little enough to fall through the dehydrator tray. Hmmmm. AH cheese cloth to the rescue.
All the prep work.
I have dehydrated several things over the last few years, tomatoes, herbs, beef but never garlic. It only took a couple hours which was amazing! Some of the before mentioned items took days.
Here we are awaiting the dehydrator.
Here we are about ½ way through the dehydration, notice the color change?
Once I determined they were dry (try to break them in half, if they snap you are done otherwise they need more time) I packaged them into containers to store in the pantry. Now you are probably saying what the hell am I going to do with those garlic discs? 1) you can grind them in a spice grinder and have your very own fresh garlic powder 2) you can chop them and make your very own garlic and oil 3) you can and them to any wet dish and rehydrate them 4) I wonder if they keep vampires away
—-Freezing Garlic
Much to my surprise you can separate, peel and freeze cloves of garlic whole, bring them out when needed and use as you would fresh. This process also retains all of the goodness garlic has to offer. So again with breaking, peeling and packaging. I used my wonderful Food Saver to vacuum seal a quart size package and just tossed it in the freezer. I am dying to try them but I still have some fresh garlic to use up.
Oh and here are all the papers, those are fun to wrangle into the trash.
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