Homemade Garlic Powder

Your family will be awestruck when you gift them with your own homemade, homegrown garlic powder.

Or, if you don’t have a spot in a yard to grow garlic, you can use farmers’ market garlic and it’s still an amazing gift.

I used to have a fair sized garlic patch in the back yard. It has been abandoned for a number of years, but the garlic keeps on coming up. I pull some of it up in the fall, and allow a few to stay in the ground through the winter and hopefully come up the next spring (somehow it always does). It doesn’t take much garlic to last the whole year and provide gifts for family and friends. As wonderful as fresh garlic is, I am too lazy to peel and chop it every time I cook with it. I would prefer to do it in a big way once a year outdoors at the patio table on a lovely fall afternoon.

Basically, you peel and slice the garlic, then dry it until it’s brittle. Then put the dry slices in a blender, then sift the powder, pour it into bottles, and label the bottles. That’s all there is to it.

To prepare the garlic, separate the cloves, trim off the root end of each clove, and pour them all into a large pot of boiling water. Allow to boil for a minute or two. Remove from the water, drain, and while still warm, pop the cloves out of their skins. They pop out easily after having been boiled for a short time.

Slice or coarsely chop the cloves of garlic and lay out on a screen, and place in a warm oven or a dehydrator. If you live in a hot dry climate, you may set them outside in a place where they will not be in direct sunlight.

When the slices are so dry they have become brittle, put a handful into a blender to about one-third full. Buzz and stir, repeat a few times. Pour the powder into a bowl and sift it into another bowl. You will have large chunks that don’t get powdered; this is normal.  Return the chunks to the blender along with more dried slices. Continue until all is powdered. You will probably have some that never gets powdered, this is fine.

With a funnel, fill bottles with the garlic powder and seal with the lid.

Place labels on the lid and side of each bottle.

TO MAKE GARLIC SALT

Mix one part garlic powder with three parts salt. A big bonus about making garlic salt is that it expands the product so you can give out many more bottles of it, and it is indeed useful.

Get the labels here:
https://www.evermine.com/food-craft_labels/preview/SPAT38-67/

Get the bottles here:
https://www.berlinpackaging.com/4-oz-clear-glass-paragon-spice-jars-black-flip-sift-spice-cap-5023b81blk/