Monday 16 August 2010

Garlic Harvest and How to Preserve Garlic...(also garlic pinkness!)

I was did some gardening this afternoon (you know those days when you don't really plan on doing gardening, so you wear your clean trousers and a white vest top, then you start noticing weeds and then five minutes later you find yourself armed with a hoe and a trowel, flinging soil about while trying to keep your clothes clean, it was one of those days today...)  I noticed that most of my garlic plants had gone completely yellow and brittle and dead looking, so I decided to dig up the remainder of the bulbs.

See!

Oh aren't they so pink and purple and lovely.  They are quite small but you can't have everything!  I think after the past two years garlic-in-pots failures I've definitely learned that they don't like it and I shall find some nice real ground for them to go into next time.  Still, they are pink, so at least that's happy!

Now I have to find some way to preserve all this garlic - I was planning on plaiting the stalks together and hanging it up somewhere (or round my neck a la le french) but half of these don't have stalks and none of them really have a fully formed skin around them, so I don't think they'll keep very well like that.  There seems to be three main ways to preserve garlic - pickling, drying and freezing (has anyone tried any of these methods?  I'd love to know the results!?)  I dislike le pickle, so I can discount that straight away. I think I'm going to try to freeze it this time - I'm going to let the garlic dry out a bit (apparently when the garlic loses moisture the flavours inside get more concentrated and I want my garlic to be garlicky!) then crush it, mix it with a little oil (to stop it completely sticking together), put it into a jar and put it in the freezer.  Before I preserve the garlic I have to wait for it to get more garlicky, so I'll update with how this garlic freezing plan works when I do it!

This site has lots of information about the health benefits and sciencey bits about different types of preserved garlic as well as how to preserve garlic and store it in lots of different ways.

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