Eight Acres

Last year we made dried garlic granules, and we found them really useful.  It took an hour or so to peel 1kg of garlic, but then over the year when we were cooking we could quickly and easily add a teaspoon of granules to cooking without having to fiddle around with garlic, so it was worth the effort and stick fingers at the time!  We also didn't have to buy any foreign garlic when the Australian garlic ran out towards the end of winter. The finished product - 1 kg of garlic dried to fit in one jar Seeing as the granules were such a success, we decided to do them again this year AND I remembered to take photos to share with you.  The process is really very simple.  We peeled the garlic, put it in the dehydrator (I ave a cheap sunbeam one), and ran it for a few hours (less this year because it was so hot anyway, I just left it outside for a few days).  After a week the garlic was not quite dry, still a bit sticky and gooey, so we whizzed it in the food proc...

A guy at work who grows garlic commercially was selling it for $10/kg.  It was pretty good quality, just the same as the garlic that is $30/kg at the shops, so I bought 2 kg of it.  We weren't sure how well it would keep, so we decided to dry it. We spent about an hour peeling 1 kg of the garlic and laid the individual cloves on the tray of our dehydrator.  We ran the dehydrator on and off for several days until the cloves were no longer sticky.  I then whizzed them all in the food processor to for granules.  We dried the granules on baking paper in the dehydrator for another day.  This produced about half a jar of granules.  As this translates to 1 kg of garlic, I imagine that they will be rather strong! We are going to use up the rest of the fresh garlic first, and then use the granules.  During winter we often find that the Australian garlic runs out and we have to buy Chinese or Mexican garlic, so I hope this year we will be able to stretc...