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Category: Vegetable gardens | Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2011 3:54 pm

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There will be no vampires within five miles of Red Gate Farm! I have been cleaning garlic the past two mornings (I do it in the morning to let the aroma disperse before my husband gets home from work and faints).
We dedicated a bed to garlic this year, and I may have planted a tad too much. We hung it in the barn to dry, and now it's ready to have the outer paper removed and put into storage, one way or another. When half of the tops are falling over and yellowed, we pull the garlic; wash it off to get rid of the dirt in the roots; tie three or four heads together on each end of a long string; and hang the string over a rope stretched between the barn rafters. With our humidity we let the garlic hang about six weeks. The test for readiness is to take a clove and squeeze it between your thumb and forefinger. If your fingers are damp, wait. If the clove doesn't have enough juice to dampen your fingers, it's ready to be cleaned and stored.
I freeze garlic. My favorite, although labor intensive way, is to freeze garlic puree. Cloves are peeled, put into my mini-food processor and chopped fine (I could do this with a knife, but laziness prevails!) and enough vegetable oil is added to moisten the garlic. Then the garlic puree is put into freezer containers, labeled, and frozen. It will last up to two years if you don't have a garlic loving family. The puree can be scraped out, even while frozen. I never thaw the puree--just grab a spoon and dig out what I need.
Garlic cloves, peeled, can be frozen whole. It's really great to be able to pull out three or four cloves when you are in the middle of a recipe and realize you haven't prepared garlic for it.
Whole heads of garlic can be frozen, also. In this case the heads are not peeled--just remove the outer paper until you get down to the "clean" and put into freezer bags or containers (I prefer bags so I can squeeze out the air) and freeze.
We also roast garlic and make roasted garlic butter to sell at the winery down the road, and to our own valued customers (the ones who pay cash).
Roasting garlic is really easy. Take a head of garlic, cut off the top 1/4" or just enough to expose the ends of the cloves, place the heads in muffin pans or any shallow baking pan (8" cake pans do well, but don't plan on baking a cake in that pan anytime soon). Drizzle with olive oil, cover with aluminum foil, and bake at 400 degrees for 30-45 minutes (depends on the age of the garlic.)This is great squeezed on toasted French bread, added to oven-baked potatoes, or mixed with chopped tomatoes and spread on Foccaccia bread as an appetizer.
Even though the local vampires hate our garlic, we sure enjoy it!


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Miss Liberty wrote on Wed Jul 13, 2011 7:18 pm:

Great information! I've thought about doing garlic in the garden next year. This will really help. I'm going to have to read through it a couple of times to make sure I understand all of it.

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