Freezing Garlic

 We were able to get the last of the locally grown, hardneck garlic from my sweeties farmer friend.   Usually he sells it in 2 lb bags, but he had 1 lb left.   My sweetie ordered it and it came home with him a couple of days ago, with the warning that it wouldn't last long.  I figured that because the last of our garlic from the 4 lbs we had in the fall, was either drying up or sprouting.  I had the option of freezing it or dehydrating it.   I don't really like the smell or taste of commercially dehydrated garlic, although we have one of those multi-function pressure cooker/air fryer appliances, do dehydrating would have been easy.   Freezing though is fast, and the frozen garlic will last up to 6 months.

The biggest issue with freezing garlic, is actually peeling it.   I checked out a few websites and videos about mass peeling garlic.   Apparently if you put a bunch of the individual cloves in a bowl or container, cover it and then shake it vigorously, the papery skins just fall off.   I tried it.   I tried it several times, in several different containers and as this photo shows, only 2 cloves were partially peeled.  The rest of the cloves papery skins were solidly attached.     The other issue with this method was that a couple of garlic cloves started to get bruised.  I think that grocery store, soft necked garlic would likely work with this method.  It has smaller cloves and may be dried differently. 

I ended up using a large knife, and tapping the garlic cloves, to crack the skins.  Then they easily peel off.  It took a couple of tries to get the pressure correct.  I usually use this method for cooking, but I use a hefty bit of pressure to crack the garlic so that the peel is almost completely removed and the garlic cloves is flattened for use.

It really didn't take a lot more pressure to flatten the clove completely.   Here you can see that the garlic is starting to sprout.   If it were any larger, it would start affecting the flavour, but the garlic taste on this was still good.

It took about 20 minutes to peel all the garlic.  It was a bit over a pound of garlic.  Look at the big, healthy cloves!   If I trimmed the tough root ends off, the garlic oils and odor could possibly escape more easily, so I left the cloves intact.   I should be able to just pluck out a couple of garlic cloves at a time and after a couple of minutes thawing, start to slice them fairly easily.  They can be trimmed up as necessary then.

A few years ago, my husband decided he wanted to try taking his lunch to work in glass containers.  It didn't last long though, because the glass storage containers are pretty heavy.  But plastic can take on the odor of the garlic quite quickly so the glass storage container was perfect.  It does have a plastic lid, but it's supposed to be air tight.   Plus it was a good size.   There were around 3 cups of garlic cloves.     So far there is no residual odor in the freezer.  Yay!     Considering how much garlic we tend to use in daily cooking, I don't think it will last long enough to see if it does last 6 months in the freezer.  I'm happy that it won't be sprouting on the shelf though