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Farm News
If you’ve somehow found yourself with a whole bunch of garlic you haven’t been able to consume, here is how we at Fresh Earth Farms turn those aromatic bulbs into delicious garlic powder!
The first task is to break the bulbs into individual cloves. Nothing fancy here and i don’t have any tips for making it easier, but it is pretty easy to begin with so break away!
Step two is to remove the skins from the cloves. Here comes the first big tip: use your air compressor with an air nozzle and a five gallon bucket. Take a handful of cloves, put them in the bucket then spray the cloves with air from your compressor. I have my compressor set at 125 PSI and it works reasonably well — if it can keep up that pressure. But since it is a smaller compressor used for a nail gun it tends to drop the pressure as I am blowing the garlic. So I have to stop and wait for the pressure to mount. Your result will vary based on your compressor’s capability. As you can see, it isn’t perfect but it gets 90% of the job done. A bigger compressor would definitely help.
Step three is to slice the garlic into thin slices. Now one could use a knife — especially if you have a sharp knife and good skills but since I don’t, I use a food processor with a slicing blade. It takes a minute or two to slice up all the garlic we processed in this batch — a little over a kilo.
Once the cloves are sliced, we spread them out over the dehydrator trays. We didn’t bother keeping them from touching and maybe overloaded them by other people’s standards, but if there is too much garlic it will just take a bit longer to dehydrate. The dehydration parts doesn’t take a lot of your time so if it take longer no big deal. We set the dehydrator to 115 degrees.
After about 14 hours (basically overnight) I checked the garlic and found it mostly dry. But mostly isn’t enough. To check if the chips are dry enough, try to break them. If they bend they need to dry more. If they snap they are ready. But, you have to let the chips cool before you do this test. Warm garlic chips tend to bend and appear to be not dry enough. So take some off the dehydrator, let them cool, then try snapping them. Since ours wasn’t quite dry enough, I took all the chips off the dehydrator then put it back on, essentially mixing it up so that it could dry more thoroughly. In our case, with a kilo of garlic and four dehydration racks it took about 48 hours. It maybe was done sooner but I didn’t have time to do the next step so I just let them continue on the dehydrator.
Once the garlic was dry we put it into a Ninja blender. We could put about half the garlic in each batch. We’ve used a spice grinder in the past but with the quantity we were grinding that would take all day. The Ninja did a reasonable job but wasn’t able to turn all the garlic chips into garlic powder.
We sifted out the powder and tried grinding the smaller chips again but that was barely successful. So we decided we needed dried minced garlic as well as garlic powder. Just seemed like the more reasonable approach that to beat our head against a wall trying to get the last of the garlic powdered.
We put the powder and minced garlic into separate jars. We put a food safe desiccant in the jar to keep it (hopefully) from clumping.
We didn’t weigh the original bulbs but had a little more that one kilo of garlic cloves after popping. This resulted in ~320 grams of powder and ~120 grams of dried minced. Your mileage may vary.
All-in-all it wasn’t too time consuming, though wasn’t something that can be done in an hour. Maybe at a smaller scale. But the time was spread over a few days with maybe a total of 2-3 hours of actual activity. And unfortunately with this approach I don’t foresee it ever becoming commercially viable at this scale. We would have to find a far faster way to complete the whole process. However, the end product was far more flavorful than typical store bought garlic. So if you have the garlic, the equipment and the time I highly recommend doing this.
Joke of the Week
What do you call someone raised on garlic?
Garlic bred.
As always, do not hesitate to send in questions, comments, suggestions, share orders or anything else you have lying around.