I don’t know about you, but the one ingredient that buy a lot of is garlic. In fact, if a recipe calls for garlic cloves, I always add in more if not double, just because I find that most recipes under season with garlic.
There has only been one problem in my house. Okay two problems. When I look for cloves I either don’t find any or I find mummified cloves that somehow managed to make their way into the back of my spice cupboard.
This past year my question to myself was, how do I preserve garlic so that it’s ready for me when I need to use it? Followed up with the question, is it possible to buy garlic in bulk and not have it stout on you and you lose it before you can use it.
The answer to the first… you can ferment garlic and extend its shelf life.
The answer to the second se question is, yes!
At the end of the last farmer’s market season, I took advantage of the end of the season clearance sale at my local vendor. I bought garlic in bulk (at least from the perspective of a single family for personal use. If I remember right, I bought somewhere near the vicinity of 7 pounds worth of garlic. Needless to say it was a far cry higher than any other time I’ve purchased garlic.
Before the purchase, I had looked up different ways to ferment garlic just to make sure I had at least one way of doing this and I was going to use/eat it. (When it comes to pickling and fermenting the flavors generally don’t taste good to me.) There we’re two that I wanted to try. Both were simple—just two ingredients each. One was garlic and water and garlic with honey.
Now the garlic and water ferment I had a general idea what to expect because I’ve fermented cabbage with water and salt. The honey sounded a bit out there and was a mystery to me.
If you’re like me and already asked, can you ferment with honey? The answer is yes! I was surprised and even excited. Especially when I did more research and found that garlic fermented in honey is a great home remedy for colds and coughs. The garlic clove has compounds that equip your body to fight off common colds. The honey, from this fermentation, is a great natural cough syrup.
During the time of this fermentation (this past fall) there was a time when local parents were having. She’s time hunting down children’s cough syrup. But fortunately, I don’t have to worry about that now because I’m keeping honey fermented garlic in stock at my house. (My way of freeing up resources for other families, who have not yet learned about natural medicine and need those resources for their kiddos.
Fermenting garlic is very simple.
- Peal garlic cloves.
- Put the cloves in a mason jar with 2” of head space.
- Fill your mason jar with your fermenting liquid so that it covers your garlic.
- Remove air bubbles and add more liquid as needed.
This step is particularly important for honey because of how thick it is. It oozes between cloves but doesn’t really thoroughly get in and around all the cloves. So I use a wooden chopstick and move the cloves around to get the honey to get in all around the cloves. Even with the honey levels well above the cloves, when I did the first stir, the honey level dropped by half. I had to go through the process of adding more honey and stirring about three times. I knew I had gotten all the air out when I stirred the cloves and the honey level did not drop a bit.
- Place a fermenting weight on top of the cloves.
- Lightly secure a canning lid on your mason jar. (Better yet, use a fermenting lid which allows the ferment to “burp” on its own.
- Keep in a cool dark place where you can remember to burp the jar.
- Garlic is fermented and ready for use in 4-6 weeks.
TIP: During active fermentation, it’s a great idea to keep the jar in a bowl. There’s a great chance that the ferment will bubble over while you’re not looking. And a bowl is your best friend when it comes to cleaning up.
TIP 2: The aroma of garlic is going to be very strong during active fermentation. So make sure the place where you keep it is one where you won’t mind the smell. (At first I had it in our pantry, but my husband was not okay with the smell. I relocated it to another location. The good news is that the garlic smell in the pantry was gone in a couple days.)
Peeling In Bulk
There are a couple of options that you have available.
You can peel the garlic the classic way with a paring knife. It’s long and tedious (particularly when you have young children under foot).
I don’t know if this next idea is still making the circuit around social media–putting cloves in a mason jar and shaking the skins off. I wished that this “trick” worked. Let’s just say that I raced my husband. He tried the jar method and I used a paring knife. The jar is fail if you fill the jar halfway or a quarter full with garlic cloves. The only time it semi worked was when the amount of cloves just covered the bottom of the jar. In the end, my husband shoved the cloves over to me when I out counted him with my paring knife. There were still the last layers of skin on the cloves that I had to peel off with the knife.
My preferred method of peeling garlic is with a silicone garlic peeler tube. With a dry tube and properly dried out garlic, it only took 1-2 rolling presses in my hands and all the layers were peeled away.
Unfortunately we only have one tube in my house and my husband and I fought over it. So we turned it into a competition. How many cloves could we peel in the amount of time it took the other to break down one bulb into cloves ready to go. We actually didn’t keep score because we were too busy laughing and working quickly on whatever end of the competition we were on!
How did the garlic turn out?
The quick answer is that I did not prefer the flavor of the finished garlic that was fermented in water. It has an acidic flavor that I have to cook out of the garlic. At this point, all health benefits from making fermented garlic is long gone, because it’s cooked to death. (I’ll come back to this.)
Originally I wasn’t sure if I would like the honey fermented garlic at all. But let me tell you this, I will never preserve garlic any other way!!!!
At the end of the fermenting process, the honey looks lighter in color and its thickness looks like it was watered down. When you taste the honey, it’s not honey sweet anymore. There’s still some sweetness present but it’s been dulled down remarkably. The garlic itself takes on a slight nutty flavor and is slightly sweeter. The pungent snap that we’re use to experiencing when eating raw garlic is greatly reduced. The garlic is still firm, but not as firm as garlic fresh from the garden.
The honey garlic is perfect to mince and add raw to a salad, especially if you drizzle a little honey on top as part of the dressing. You will not regret using honey garlic as a finishing touch on Italian or Asian inspired dishes. In fact, I can think of many many more applications for this form of garlic than I can with its raw counterpart.
Benefits of Fermented Garlic
The most famous compound that Garlic is known for providing is Allicin. If you need a jumping off point for the health benefits that allicin provides for our bodies, check out this article. In short it’s good for helping your Immune System do its job and reducing inflammation.
Fermentation brings its own benefits to any vegetable that you bring through this process. The most talked about benefit is improving your gut health by feeding the good bacteria that resides in your Gastrointestinal System. Here’s a good place to start seeing all the other benefits available to our bodies.
These two reasons are enough to send you on a well rewarding researching adventure for understanding why garlic and fermented foods are both important to being added into our diets.
Why Should I Ferment Garlic?
Whether you grow your own garlic are want to take advantage of garlic that you find at a great price, fermenting garlic is a sure way of preserving your garlic.
Over the years, I’ve tossed out garlic because it turned into mummified cloves, had mold, or started sprouting before I could use it. By fermenting, you get to stop the clock on the life of your garlic. The common practice of braiding garlic and storing it in a cool dark place slows down the clock on the garlic, but it will still approach a time where those bulbs and cloves also start to sprout. By fermenting, you’re adding more time that you have available to use the garlic that you have in your kitchen.
And in the instance of the honey garlic, you have the added bonus of having a home remedy cough medicine. Over the last two years there have been many things on the store shelves that have been out of stock. Cough syrup, especially for children, was one of those things this past fall and winter. I haven’t even bothered checking the shelves to see if that situation has fixed itself. But I can rest assured that a dose of the honey with a clove of garlic will not only treat coughs in my family, it will give our bodies added nutrients which help our immune systems fight off whatever cold or virus that we are dealing with.
What do you love using garlic for???
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