Salt-Dried Garlic Update

In the beginning.

Back in January, as knobs sensed the lenghtening post-solstice days, I got around to preserving garlic for the rest of the year. As much as I love cutting into a fresh clove, there's no way I know of to extend that in the period from Winter til Summer Solstice, when the fresh snap softens and the white cloves develop a green core bent on autophagy.

As usual, I peeled a sizable portion of the crop and dropped it into olive oil. Over the years, I've occasionally read that this method carries a risk of botulism, but it's never happened to me--beware if you intend to eat some home-cooked garlic-rich meals cooked in my kitchen--and my main objection is that there's a bit of sulfur phunk to this technique.

This time, though, I took some of the peeled cloves and nestled them in layers of kosher salt. Seemed like it could work, but not knowing, it was a gamble.

At the end.

Just this week, after 9 or 10 months in the jar, I peeked at the result. The garlic dried to a pliable leathery texture without making the salt gooey or brown. Bite into it, and it's clear that some of its own bite has fled, but the result is a mellow richness, more of a complex flavor. Like replacing raw jalapeno with dried ancho, maybe. Sliced and cooked into a meal, it tasted like,...garlic. I have yet to taste the salt, but I have to think it will be pretty damn good.

So as experiments go, I'm happy how this one turned out.
Does it preserve my home-grown garlic? Yep.
Is it easy? Uh-huh.
Did the garlic sprout? Nope.
Is there a side benefit? Salt.

Preserving Garlic*

Garlic Unclad

If you tuned into the Garlic Calendar, then you know that the cloves sense the Winter Solstice, and commence to sprouting, threatening your year's supply of homegrown flavor. But I'm such a procrastinator that I cannot follow my own advice, and it was only in the new year that I got around to peeling and storing the dozens of cloves that were sitting in the garage. Just these couple of weeks had the garlic doing this:

Hot erotic garlic, or just reproduction?

While they're starting on the new cycle that would birth a new plant, the cloves are not yet too far gone (besides, I kinda like the look of slices with the green circle in the center). But before the sprouts get as long as the cloves from which they spring, before the flesh gets soft, before pungent aroma becomes putrid regret, I need to somehow stop the process. In years past, this has been a matter of dropping peeled cloves into a jar and drowning them in olive oil. I did that again, but this time I'm trying a couple of other methods.

Salt and the earth.

Here's experiment #1. Good old fashioned salting. Pour pickling salt into a jar, put in a layer of peeled cloves, then bury them in salt, then more garlic, more salt,...you get the picture. The cloves are firm, and I did not irrigate, so I don't expect osmosis to create a saline slush, but it's an experiment. For reference, the majority of the cloves in the first photo and a bunch of salt filled a pint jar. I'll check back in later to let you know if this is a fail, but I suspect that what will happen is that the cloves stay intact, and I get a batch of garlic salt.

Experiment #2 is yet to be done. I had a bunch of large-cloved heads of garlic this year; some are elephant garlic, but not necessarily all. The plan is to roast them, smoosh the result, spread it out on parchment paper, and dehydrate it. I'm aiming for something like fruit leather, a hide of garlicky goodness that I can snip into strips or drop into the pot whole whenever I want that twice-roasted garlic flava.

Winter Morning Sun Dawns on Evening's Leavings

And then there's this, the old standby: cloves in oil. Chopped or pureed garlic tastes harsh and goes bad quicker. Drowning while cloves in oil and keeping them out of direct sunlight seems to halt the sprouting process. I'll remove the rubber gasket from the jar above so that the occasional fermentation fart can escape. In time, the cloves will soak up the oil and become beautifully translucent, edible amber. 

There are other ways to preserve garlic, but I don't like them (pickling? I just throw some in the cuke pickles I make, and that's plenty for my taste), or I don't know them. If you want to write in with others, I'll listen.

So if you have not yet dealt with your garlic, do it now! 

* [For whatever reason, it took me a month to think of my Greenstead post as food-ish, and post it here.]

Tails

The Salish Sea pulses with life, schools and shoals swarm forth each in their season. Americans have gotten used to suspending seasons, eating tomatoes year round, never fretting over dwindling root cellars, and forgetting for the most part about special treats summoned by a Spring rain or a Summer sun or a Fall run. 


A step removed from nature, we people have set what we call seasons when it is allowed to fish or hunt for most of the edible ones. Recently there was a season for Spot Shrimp (Pandalus platyceros, the largest species on the West Coast), and I happened to be a step removed from a fisherman who made a good haul. 


This was my first encounter with this bundle of marine protein, but a prawn is a prawn, and anything that you can prepare on the day it was caught will be at its novice-forgiving best. Better yet, Spots make it easier by not having that vein of poo running down the tail, needing to be laboriously cut out. The carapace stretching back from the eyes holds all the guts--you snap it off and get rid of it (skip over to the "Heads" post at Urban Greenstead for that and of this tale).

Easy. Done with 5 pounds in a few minutes. Tails in the fridge and ready to be dinner. 

This is where a food blog is supposed to have a beautiful picture of the prawns in prep, and another of plated sublimity. But I procrastinated, as usual, and when one of the shrimp-eaters bailed, and only one of my family likely to even try them, I found myself putting them in the freezer at 9 at night. So you get no photo spread, no great recipe, no companion dishes. The only thing of value this post really has to offer is that when you freeze these critters, cover them in water, or when they thaw, they'll be mushy. 

A few days later, I did get around to cooking up a batch, but again there is little to offer the reader. My sole method was to assume that melted butter full of garlic chives would fix any flaw.  I thought I'd steam them, but fat or something in the shrimp made the water boil a massive foam that forced me to lift post from burner and lid from pot. The daughter brave enough to try retreated before too long because the "feet-thingies creep me out." My shrimpficionado guest allowed that they were OK, but not spectacular. I felt about the same; the garlicky butter made it ok, but couldn't quite overcome the taint of failure to eat some that first day, or completely hide the mushiness I thought I sensed. 


But, no disaster, and no waste. Errors and lapses are alright if we learn from them. There will be another shrimp season, and I'll be ready.

Spring Garlic

Garlic pokes up through colder ground and shorter days than a lot of its garden compadres. Even in my yard's procrastinating Spring, only a day after Equinox, the vee-creased shoots are ankle high. This is in a new bed enriched with fireplace ash, maybe a hundred or so plants. There are a few odd rows here and there in the yard, and of course a few heads I missed last fall sprouting green tonsures.


Contrary to the Fall-planting orthodoxy, I pulled up and split up some of the volunteer knobs, replanting willy nilly just a couple of weeks ago. Others I let be until a hankering for scallions or scapes, maybe an autumnal bulbil, brings me back. Freebies for the rest of the year, with the extra spice only disorthodoxy can summon.


Meanwhile, inside the house, the cloves awaken. As soon as the mature heads are pulled from the soil, garlicians struggle to make them last as long as possible. A cool dry garage and some jars of olive oil did the trick this year. At least until the Solstice, when even under roof and Winter's cloudy grey, the cloves hear the call of the lengthening days and begin their six-month stretch. Either I've selected better keepers or I was lucky this time around, because by this time in previous years, all the dry stuff had long since decided to be a new plant.

The last of the dried cloves, just now sprouting, don't inspire foodies. They're yellowing and getting a little soft; the only crisp part is a green shoot through the heart of each one, reaching out the top for light. Meanwhile, at the other end, octopodic roots begin to reach out, hoping to get their tentacles into some soil. Some people would plant them, others (under the thrall of Autumnist dogma?) would waste them, or at best relegate them to the compost. 


But being frugal, I use them up. Sliced, each piece is an eye with a green pupil, a look I like. Then again, doing nothing more than peeling them (easy, at this late stage) and tossing them in whatever happens to be in the works works as well. A recent desire to cut out the chemicals and other afflictions of canned beans, I've been buying them dried, and cooking them in a crock pot. A head of past-prime garlick cloves added to this gestation is a fine and nearly effortless addition. I will end this entry with proof, in the form of another of my so-simple-it's-not-even-a-recipe recipes:

Crocked Garlic and Beans

• Clean and rinse 1 pound of dried beans
• Peel however much garlic you want
• Put it all in a crock-pot with water
• Turn it on
• Wait

While you are waiting, decide whether you want to add anything else. You'll have hours to think of extra ingredients, such as: beer, salt, schmaltz, celery,... You should probably stop obsessing about bean cuisine right about now. It's unbecoming of simple staples, which have humble souls that are put off by high-falutingness (but tolerant of flatusness). Just let 'em cook until you are satisfied with their mushiness. And turn whatever epicurean inspiration that might strike toward something to go with your crock o beans.