How to dry garlic

The one crop we've grown this year that surpassed my expectations is garlic. Garlic will last for a long time when stored in cool, dry conditions, but we have so much of it that I am worried that it will start to go bad before we use it all.  Time to find a way to preserve it before I lose it!

When I don't have garlic I grew myself (i.e. any time prior to now), I generally buy the pre-minced garlic you can find in a jar at the grocery store. Ideally, I would can all my garlic up and use it that way. You can read about how Patrice Lewis of the Rural Revolution blog cans her garlic here.

Although I am an experienced canner, I tend to follow the established guidelines and not venture into the "grey areas" of canning such as canning bacon, butter, and, as it turns out, garlic. Here is a link to an article about the safe preservation of garlic. If you read through it, you will see that they do not recommend canning garlic. It seems that pressure canning destroys much of the flavor of garlic and so canning authorities have never bothered to establish the proper processing times for garlic. That's too iffy for me and so I decided to forgo canning garlic.

With canning out, I decided to dry much of my garlic. Here's how I did it.

Drying Garlic

Peeling the garlic and trimming off the root end

I won't lie: the first step of the process is very tedious. Gather your heads of garlic and separate them into cloves. Then, peel the cloves and trim off the root ends. One reason I have mostly used pre-minced canned garlic for all these years is so I don't have to deal with the sticky, papery, garlic peels. I peeled so many heads of garlic this time that my fingers were covered with garlic juice. The peels then kept getting stuck to my fingers and transferred to the clean garlic cloves, cutting board, and pretty much everywhere else in the kitchen. It was a mess, but the good news is that the rest of the procedure is really, really easy.

I used the slicing blade on my food processor to slice the garlic into uniform pieces

Now you need to slice your garlic by hand or with a food processor. You can mince the garlic into smaller bits if you desire, but be aware that they may fall through the mesh of your dehydrator screen.

The food processor makes quick work of this task

Once your garlic is sliced, it's time to dry it. I have an Excalibur food dehydratorand I looked up the correct temperature to dry garlic in my owner's manual. I set the thermostat at 105 degrees and placed the garlic slices on the drying trays. I was worried that some of the garlic pieces were small enough to fall through the trays as they dried and shrank, so I lined the trays with plastic wrap before I put the garlic on.  I checked on the garlic every few hours and stirred it once. It took about 8 hours before it was completely crisp and dry.

The finished product

If you don't have a dehydrator, I have also read about people drying garlic in the oven. The lowest temperature my oven goes to is 170 degrees, so drying garlic in there would take careful monitoring to prevent over-browning. Ever eaten a piece of scorched garlic before? Yuck! I would turn your oven to the lowest temperature it goes, stir often, and consider propping the oven door open a bit.

What do you do with dried garlic? 

•  Throw a few pieces into a soup or stew. It will reconstitute while it cooks and lend its flavor to the meal. You might want to fish the larger pieces out after you're done cooking the dish, though, because these babies pack quite a wallop. 
• Grind the dried garlic in a food processor or spice grinder to make your own garlic powder.
• My favorite: Soak a clove's worth of dried garlic in some warm water until soft. Mince and use in recipes in place of canned minced garlic!  

Enjoy! 

In Which I Turn My Kitchen Into a Hazmat Site

We grew 18 pepper plants in 2011. One of those was a cayenne pepper and it was a bit of an impulse buy. Hubby Dear and I were looking at the pepper transplants for sale at a big box store in the next county and it caught our eye. We had never used fresh cayenne peppers before, but we felt that surely we could find something to do with them.

The collection of dried cayenne pepper pods

The plant did really well and produced hundreds of slender green fruits that ripened to a dark red. We decided that the best use of the cayennes would be to turn them into either crushed red pepper flakes or ground red pepper, so we laid them out in a corner of the kitchen to dry.

They have been dry for several months now, waiting for me to get off my tuchus and get around to grinding them. Yesterday was the fateful day.

Although you may wonder after you read about the rest of my misadventure, I'm not entirely clueless when it comes to chile peppers. I knew I should wear gloves while I was working with the cayennes so I didn't get any of the oils on me.  I put on a pair of gloves and began pulling off the stems of the peppers. After the stems were removed, it was a simple matter to shake out the seeds and then pop pieces of dried pepper into my spice grinder. Easy peasy, right?

When grinder was full of pepper pieces, I put the lid on and let it rip. It didn't take much grinding before I noticed pepper dust sprinkling my counter. Hmm, I guess the lid isn't exactly airtight. No matter. I proceeded on.

Then I started sneezing. Huge, messy, half-choking sneezes. Ever heard an elephant sneeze? Me neither, but I imagine that's what I sounded like.

Hubby Dear helpfully hinted that perhaps one of those N-95 masks I have stored would be useful at a moment like this. Since my gloved hands were covered in cayenne dust, he ventured out from living room, held his breath and hurriedly put the mask over my nose and mouth. He retreated quickly to watch his basketball game and thanked his lucky stars that he had an excuse for missing the kitchen shenanigans.  

In his haste to exit the premises, the Hubster hadn't properly situated the mask on my face. My exhalations were somehow getting channeled up towards my eyes. The moist air (keep in mind that the amount of cayenne pepper dust I had already inhaled had me breathing like Darth Vader) fogged my glasses. I'm not sure exactly what I did or how it happened, but the culminating event was a puff of cayenne launched into my eyeball.

To his credit, Hubby Dear did use the DVR to pause the game and check on me while I frantically washed my eye out with cold water. He sympathized with my irritated lungs during TV timeouts. Thanks, honey. I'm glad to know that I rank only slightly lower than our alma mater's basketball team. ;)

Nearly 1/2 c. of very potent ground red pepper

I only made it through half of our dried pepper pods before the above-described disaster. That yielded me nearly 1/2 a cup of ground red pepper, plenty for the next few months. It is much brighter in color than the cayenne I buy at the local grocery store. Hubby Dear says it smells really good, too. I can't say I've tried it yet. After the Unfortunate Incident and the following Hazmat-style cleanup, my lungs seize up if I even think about cayenne!

This may be my most painful exercise in self-sufficiency yet.





Postscript: Our 2012 garden plan includes more cayenne peppers. I guess some people will never learn!

What This Closet Prepper Got for Christmas

I am still "in the closet" about my prepping to my family and friends. I prefer it that way due to OPSEC concerns and to avoid the inevitable taunting. My dad and brother were discussing rifles at our family Christmas gathering. When I declared my interest in getting a rifle for shooting varmints, everyone got a look on their face like I had begun singing "Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay" and performing the Can-Can right there in the living room. I hadn't even mentioned anything about zombies! Yes, indeed, it is much easier for me just to stay under the radar.

However, that doesn't mean I can't receive prepping-related presents from my relatives for Christmas! I have two Amazon.com wish lists. One is public and has items that even a supposedly wimpy, squeamish person like myself would want. My other wishlist is set up to be private. I use it to keep track of more "hardcore" prepping items that I want to remember to add to our gear but do not want to let the whole world know about.  I was fortunate enough to receive a selection of items from my public wishlist and I thought I'd briefly review each. You may want to add these to your own wish lists!


1. A Coffee/Spice Grinder





Neither Hubby Dear nor I are coffee drinkers, so I didn't get this for the first function. Once you grind spices in a coffee grinder, you wouldn't want to use the grinder for coffee, anyway, unless you like your coffee to have a kick! Whole spices last longer than ground ones do, so they are better for long term storage. This little gizmo will quickly grind whole spices into a fine powder. I got this primarily to turn our homegrown cayenne peppers into ground red pepper. Stay tuned for an upcoming post on that process.


2. A Galvanized Chicken Fount

Both of my in-laws grew up on farms that raised chickens for eggs. They don't have the fondest memories of chicken keeping and I think they are privately expecting our chicken experiment to crash and burn. Nevertheless they bought me this chicken waterer. That's what you call love.

And now for the books....

3. The Heirloom Life Gardener by Jere and Emilee Gettle

Many of you are familiar with Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. If you aren't, you should be! I truly admire the founder, Jere Gettle; how can you have anything but respect for someone who starts a groundbreaking seed company at the age of 17? When I found out that he had put out his own gardening book, I knew I had to have it.

Once I read it, however, I was a bit disappointed. Don't get me wrong. It is full of gorgeous pictures and it is an unintimidating introduction to gardening. I was sad for two reasons. First, it was written with such a bland voice. I am sure that anyone who wears the colorful duds that Jere Gettle favors is much more entertaining than this book lets on. (Do a Google search for him and look at the photos and see what I'm talking about!) Second, and most importantly, it just didn't have that much new information for me. It would look cute on my coffee table, but not get much use.

Here's my advice: just get the free Baker Creek catalog. Many of the photos and some of the text are reprinted there! If you are interested in more in-depth information, I prefer Seed to Seed for information on seed saving and All New Square Foot Gardening, Four-Season Harvest, Mini Farming, and The Resilient Gardener for general gardening info.

4. Chicken and Egg: A Memoir of Suburban Homesteading with 125 Recipes by Janice Cole

When my old college roommate read on Facebook that I was getting chickens, she recommended that I get this book. Since I love "city girl goes country" type memoirs, I thought this would be perfect for me and added it to my wish list. Chicken and Egg is a nice book, but I would classify it as mostly a cookbook with a bit of the author's life thrown in. The recipes look delicious and I'm sure to turn to this book once my 16 (!) prospective hens start laying. If you're looking for a true memoir, try The Dirty Life,which is one of the best books I read in 2011.

5. Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: What You Should and Shouldn't Cook from Scratch by Jennifer Reese

This book is based on a fun concept. What commonly store-bought foods are worth making yourself? Which should you have no guilt about purchasing? Jennifer Reese spent years perfecting recipes for items like Worcestershire sauce, Camembert, and tahini. This book reminds me of "Julie and Julia" - the movie, that is, not the book. (The movie was cute, but I do NOT recommend the book for those who are offended by foul language and loose morals. It made me feel dirty when I attempted to read it.)  I'm looking forward to trying some of the more obscure recipes in this book. I've made my own laundry detergent and grind my own wheat, so I guess this is the next logical step!

6. The Apple Grower by Michael Phillips

I'll admit that I was first attracted to this book because of the photo on the front cover. The author looks like my brother, a Deadhead and youthful-troublemaker turned responsible husband and father. That has nothing to do with apples or this book, but I thought I'd throw that in there! ;)

I had the chance to borrow the first edition of this book from our local library and I was immediately impressed. If you want to grow apples organically, this is a fabulous resource. The book I bought is the revised and expanded edition. It has color pictures and even more useful information. Hubby Dear and I will spend a lot of time pouring over this book and putting the information into practice.



7. The Small-Scale Poultry Flock: An All-Natural Approach to Raising Chickens and Other Fowl for Home and Market Growers by Harvey Ussery

I saved the best for last. I love, love, love this book. It is certainly the most helpful chicken book I have read, and believe me, I've read them A LOT of them. It has color pictures and is full of very down-to-earth, detailed advice. It is the perfect book for those of us who are interested in self-sufficiency since it gives instruction on how to grow your own feed and breed your own chicks. This book and Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens are destined to be my go-to guides on chickens.


Did you get or give any prepping-related gifts this Christmas?