Sunday, September 15, 2013

Garlic powder

With the abundance of garlic we had this year, Daddy and I decided to try and use the single clove heads of garlic to make our own garlic powder. It is a fairly simple process, but it does take some time and some effort on our part.
Garlic that has cured for awhile
This is one bulb from the smaller garlic plants. They are 1 clove of garlic in the bulb, and perfect for this since they are pain to use for cooking (too much peeling to do multiples of). However, the first step, like anything with garlic is to remove the peel and cut off the root end of the garlic.  
That is 1 clove of garlic
Yes, this is the size of one clove. I was trying to use my thumb for scale. As you can see they garlic is good sized for one clove, but fairly small if that is suppose to be a whole bulb. Next you slice the garlic into thin slices.
Drying Garlic
Once sliced into thin slices, you lay the garlic out on the dehydrator rack. We tried to keep all the slices the same thickness, but due to what we were slicing, we did have some variation. The thinner your slices, the shorter the drying time. I think we let ours run most of a day or so until they were fairly brittle.
Garlic powder made the old fashioned way
Then comes the turning it to powder part. I would love to say I used the mortar and pestle for ALL of our garlic powder, but I would be lying. We tried the mortar and pestle and it worked quite well, but took forever, and since this was something where I really really didn't have all day to spend grinding, we decided to use our emersion blender's chopper bowl attachment. That worked quiet well but make sure when you are done, you leave it closed and off for a long time before opening to allow all the dust to settle. 
Homemade Garlic powder
We poured it into a empty glass spice bottle and threw a label on it. Daddy has decided this tastes light years better then the commercial stuff. 

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