After spending almost a decade in the event decorating industry I have repetatively heard "I can do that". Instead of being dismissed by creative minded people, I want to show you how I do "that" so you can be sucessful in recreating that inspiration image. I just might have a few tricks that you haven't seen yet!
With the growing list of food ingredients that people become sensitive to, it’s easy for families to kind of go numb reading ingredient lists. Not only is it difficult to read the chemical name of some of the ingredients (let alone answer the questions, “Why is this in here?”), but some families are now asking, “What isn’t listed?”
For example, natural flavoring is listed as a single ingredient but can actually incorporate up to 200 different ingredients. It’s a shady practice, because it could be something as simple as a proprietary blend of herbs. Although it’s more likely the summation of chemicals used for extractions of certain elements for flavoring. But how is a family to know what chemicals or processes were used and make the educated decision if this is something that is harming the health of a loved one?
So whether you’re looking to cut some corners in your grocery budget, trying to eliminate ingredients in your diet, or simply wanting to eat more simply (knowing exactly what you’re cooking with, able to say the ingredients, and other reasons) you can make basic kitchen ingredients from scratch. Bullion is one of those ingredients that you can make in advance and have it in your pantry waiting for you to use!
Advertisements
First Make Your Stock
I’m going to move forward here with making chicken stock and turning it into chicken bouillon. However you can do this by making your own beef stock or vegetable stock. (And I just want to say that when you make your own vegetable stock, it actually has more flavor and tastes a thousand times better than what you will buy in your local grocery store!)
There are also a few different ways that you can cook your stock. You can make stock on stovetop, in a slow cooker in your oven, in a crock pot, or a pressure cooker. The only difference is going to be the amount of time you commit to. With the exception of the pressure cooker, you will want to cook low and slow to release all the nutritional benefits of your ingredients. A lot of influencers, bloggers and You Tubers will encourage you to make a stock in a short amount of time. Of course it is possible, but I want to encourage you to take the time and cook your stock ingredients out.
If you’re making a bone broth, cook it so that you extract the marrow from the bones. If you’re cooking vegetables, don’t assume that because you’re not extracting marrow that you can get by with less time. Check out my post A Touch Bitter? where I specifically talk about vegetable stock.
You know that you have a good and flavorful stock when it has rich and dark colors. The color comes from all the nutrients that you cook out from your original ingredients.
Advertisements
My Chicken Stock
I’m going to be honest with you here, daddy taught me how to cook by following a recipe. But I inherited a wild cooking hair from mom, where we improvise. I cook by smell, then by flavor, all over what a recipe says. I’m working hard to make notes on my recipes to find a strong base that is pretty average for how my recipes go. Just know that when I have chicken bones to use, I literally use the ingredients that I have on hand. And just like your kitchen, there are ingredients that I run out of. I don’t go to the store for missing ingredients. I run with what I have.
Here’s what I have standard in my kitchen:
onion skins (kept in a vegetable food scrap bag in the freezer)
garlic skins (vegetable food scrap bag)
stems of herbs that dehydrate to make my own dried herbs (vegetable food scrap bag)
dehydrated herbs from my garden (oregano, basil, lemon balm, sage, parsley, chives and others)
dehydrated herbs that I have yet to successfully produce in my garden (ginger, tumeric and others)
General Recipe
In my 8 quart instant pot I add:
the bones of one whole chicken fryer
if the chicken came with gizzards, I cook the gizzards here in my stock.
the vegetable food scraps from my freezer (ideally I aim for the skins of about 4 onions, the skins of 2-4 garlic heads, half a bunch of leafy herbs)
herbs from my seasoning shelves (including salt and pepper)
filtered water that fills my pot up to it’s Max line.
The herbs are generally where I run out of supply and have to improvise. If I have everything the herbs that I like to add are:
Ginger
Bay leaves
Lemon balm (fresh will give you more of a lemon flavor, dehydrated will have more of a green tea lemon flavor, use according to which type you’re using. I like going heavier on the fresh lemon balm)
Rosemary
Oregano
These herbs I go heavy on. If I’m out of any of these, I improvise using other herbs. Sage I use sparingly because it’s such a potent herb. Cilantro I use sparingly because I have family members who dislike the flavor of this herb. So I keep this one low in quantity to still get the nutritional value, but the flavor is not prominent at all. Fresh cracked pepper I use in varying levels depending on what my stock is currently at. Salt, I try to remember to add, but half the time I forget. Because the flavor of salt is not extracted, like herbs, I have no problem seasoning with salt once my pressure cooking is done.
I set my instant pot to pressure cooking, on high, for 3 hours. (No matter which stock type I’m making, I don’t ever go less than 3 hours.) This is what gives you full extraction.
Making Bullion
Once your broth has finished processing, you strain out all the ingredients. With a vegetable stock, I go ahead and compost the vegetable bits that I strain out. With bone stock I strain out all the bones and vegetables and they are thrown out.
If you’re making vegetable bullion, you can cool your stock down to room temperature and then move forward with the next step. If you make a bone broth (chick, beef, venison, goat, sheep, etc.) you will need to cool your broth off over night in your refrigerator. The exception is if you have a fat skimmer that can separate the fat out from hot broth. I do not. So I refrigerate my stock over night.
Once the fat layer has formed on your chilled broth, you skim the fat off of the broth.
You have to skim off of the fat, because when you make bullion you want to have a long shelf life. Fat is the limiting factor in shelf stable food. It will go rancid before anything else goes bad. So by removing the fat, you ensure that you have a long shelf life for your bullion.
When my chicken broth is been skimmed from fat, I grab my jelly roll trays for my dehydrator and set my dehydrator up where it’s going to process the broth. The reason why I set my dehydrator up in location and fill the jelly roll trays on the stacked racks is because the broth is going to run to lowest point. There is not going to be an even layer of broth. So I fill in place and pour the stock until I reach the lip at one point on my tray. This will maximize the amount of broth I can process at a single time.
Dehydrating liquid hack: before placing your liquid on the jelly roll trays put it in a sauce pan and reduce the stock. By evaporating the liquid down, you will cut down on your dehydrating time and save space in your dehydrator.
I run my dehydration temperature at 140-145°F until the broth is crispy like this. Dehydration time is going to vary depending on if you reduced your broth first, the temperature you dehydrate out, and most importantly the thickness of where your broth pools. The thicker sections will be gummy to touch until it’s properly dehydrated. The thinner bits you can leave as is. Or when you check on your progress, you can used a silicone spatula to push the thinner bits in closer to the thicker bits (this makes it easier to remove the thinner sections when you’re finished dehydrating).
In the center of my jelly roll try, you’ll see that I put my coffee/herb grinder in the center. It makes it easy to brush the chunks and bullion dust into the grinder. When the container reaches its limit I remove the tray, cap the grinder and run it for about 10 seconds. Just long enough for the broth to turn into a powder. The bullion powder I put directly into my mason jar that I’m going to store it in.
Just so you won’t be alarmed, what you see in this 1/2 pint size jar is what my 8 quart size instant pot produces. My first time making my own bullion, I was disappointed that it didn’t make more. But that disappointment disappeared when I tasted the bullion. You will not be disappointed with the intense flavor!
This is perfectly save to keep in your pantry or in your spice cupboard.
Personally I have a tiny kitchen, so I keep my bullion on the top shelf of my fridge. The bullion usually doesn’t last my family a year. Although there was a time where I needed to free up some jars and use my canned chicken stock, so I had one batch of bullion powder in my fridge for about 2 years. It was still fresh and flavorful when I went back to finish this bullion off.
Comment below and tell me how you like this space saving flavorful bullion.
How does it compare to what you’ve previous bought from the store?
This post contains affiliate links to products. We may receive a commissions on products purchased through these links, but at no extra cost to you. These items listed here are from Amazon but may be purchased at local markets.
If you don’t have a current dehydrator and are looking for one, I have been very pleased with this dehydrator. This was an upgrade from my very first dehydrator, but still on a budget. If you’re in a tight financial place, with today’s economy, this is the one that I highly recommend. Not only was it a great price, but it also included jelly roll trays for each rack (something that can’t be said with other budget units)
A few years ago, my oldest came home from school saying that he and one of his friends were BFFs. I asked him if he knew what that meant. He said, “Yes, mom, Bacon Friends Forever!”
I tried so hard not to laugh. He was serious. And it got me thinking about how no matter the culture people have always bonded together over food.
Today I want to talk about curing meat. If you are a non-pork eater (whether for religious or personal reasons) please stay with me here, because the curing of bacon is the same process as curing other meats. For example, Pastrami is made with beef using the same method (even with a different seasoning recipe). And you can even make Bacon using Beef as a substitute (there’s a recipe for this at the very end of the post).
The process of curing meat use to be common knowledge for all families before refrigerators were invented. In fact there are still many cultures around the world that still cure meat in their traditional ways. If you are interested in learning other methods 2 Guys & A Cooler is one channel that I follow. And what surprises me is just how similar all these other meat preserving methods are to making bacon.
Curing meats, in short, is the process of removing water from meat to make it shelf stable without refrigeration. This is done by using high amounts of salt.
The reason why salt works in preserving meat is because salt draws water out of the meat and creates a saline environment that makes the meat inhospitable to the growth of colonies of bacteria and mold.
Specific salamis are cured for a specific flavor brought from the controlled growth of certain mold. So, in this instance salt is the controlling agent to that mold growth.
I mention this before starting to show you how easy it is to cure meat because there are certain diets where it can be tempting to alter meat curing recipes. You need to keep the high salt content on order to not grow bacteria or mold on your meat, and making it dangerous to eat. There are methods to alter the saltiness of the meat later on in the curing process. So give me a moment, and I will come full circle back to salt levels.
Advertisements
Let’s Make Bacon!
There’s many bacon recipes found all over the internet. My husband and I have tried at least half a dozen. And that doesn’t include the experiments we made in trying to make our own. None of them compare to the recipe made by Jess Pryles, which is our go to recipe. The easiest way of describing it is to think of your favorite grocery store brand and multiplying your love for it a hundred times. Or think of the best bacon you had in a restaurant, and this bacon turns out better than even the finest restaurant. That’s how much we love this recipe. So this is the one I’m going to share with you because it’s not too sweet, not too spicy, smokes without burning or sticking to your smoker/grill, and the level of saltiness is easy to manage for your preference–both at the beginning of the curing process and at the end.
This recipe can be multiplied in direct relation to the weight of the pork belly you are working with. See “Managing Saltiness” to see how you want to treat this ingredient as well as the pink curing salt.
Managing Saltiness
Before I move on to the process I want to briefly walk you through your first option of managing the saltiness of your bacon–or any cured meat for that matter. You have two options of salt to use: fine grain salt or rock salt.
Fine grain salt is your table salt, kosher salt, or any other salt that has been milled down to a fine powder. Because of how small the salt has been broken down into, the salt easily penetrates deep into the muscle tissue of the meat. This will give you a punch in the face saltiness level that you can further modify at the end of the curing process.
Rock salt is the crystal salt that you usually see in the store for sea salt or Himalayan salt. There’s a couple of other salt options out there that uses the crystals or rocks to put in your own spice grinder or mill. Because the rocks are obviously larger than the salt grains, it takes it longer for the saltiness to enter into the meat tissue. This process speeds up as the water is extracted from the meat and “melts” the salt crystal/rock. If you prefer cooking on the less salt is more spectrum if cooking, this is the salt you want to use. (I’m in this spectrum, so I always use this salt for curing meat.)
One more thing I want to address, before moving on to the process, is the pink salt ingredient. If you are nitrite or nitrate sensitive, you definitely want to leave out this ingredient. Pink curing salt is included in many recipes because it is preserving agent. Depending on how quickly you move (or don’t move) through a pork belly depends on if this is a necessary ingredient for you.
Without the pink curing salt, your bacon can be kept in your fridge for a couple weeks before spoiling. So if you go through a lot of bacon, that the pink curing salt really isn’t necessary. But if it will take you months to eat through pounds (however big your pork belly is) you will need to think of an alternative long term storage option, such as bagging up the bacon in your family’s serving sizes and storing in the freezer.
As a comparison note, we cured whole bellies with the pink curing salt, and life happened. We were unable to cook with the bacon like we thought we would and it took us almost three months to finish that batch. It’s instances like this where families might choose to use a pink curing salt. But making bacon has happened long before the manufacture and sales of pink curing salt.
Advertisements
Curing Container
There are a couple of different options you can go with when it comes to what you will contain your bacon in while curing. You can choose to use zip lock bags, closed container, or open container.
The open container is easy because everyone has one. There are a handful of drawbacks though. First, you keep the curing bacon in your fridge, so an open container leaves your meat vulnerable to flavor exchange with other foods. The bacon is also vulnerable to other contaminates, such as someone sneezing while looking in the fridge. And the water extracted from the meat gums up in the bottom of the container through the curing process.
A closed container is by far better in regards that it prevents all the draw backs of the open container. Plus, if you are a family that eliminates or minimizes the amounts of plastics in your house, this fits in your lifestyle. But the drawback for the average home kitchen, is that you might not have a large enough reusable container for your meat to lie flat. I do have a Pyrex casserole dish (which has a lid) that’s the perfect size for a 5lb pork belly. However it comes out of meal cooking circulation for a week.
Both of these options are great for their own reasons. However it’s important to note that these two containing methods will require that you handle the curing meat by hand or other kitchen utensil such as thongs. So if you have any food handling aversions, this might be your determining factor.
The other option is using plastic zip lock bags. You will have to cut the meat down to fit in a one gallon size bag. Or you can leave it whole if you have 2.5 gallon bags. This option gives you an automatic barrier for when it’s time to flip the meat and contain all the extracted water. It is also the most space saving method in the fridge, if space is the limiting factor. The drawback to this option is the dreaded bag failure. If the seal is not secure, you will have the extracted water leaking in your fridge.
If you are using a 3 lb pork belly, the 1 Gallon Zip Lock Bag will be large enough. We generally use a 6-9lb belly and need the 2.5 Gallon Bag.
This bag method has been my method of choice with littles in the house. It just minimizes the other potential could-go-wrongs that happen in a very active house where the kids love to help and be part of the cooking process.
The pictures you see throughout this post are from the bag method and closed container, but we have done all three. They all work. But the open container method also dries out the meat, so it definitely does not come out as tender as the other two methods.
The Process
Measure out your seasoning ingredients (in direct relation to the weight of your pork) and set aside.
Remove your Pork Belly from it’s wrappings (whether direct from a butcher or from a wholesale meat provider) and rinse it off to remove any juices that it may have had in its packaging.
Season your meat with the seasoning ingredients, making sure that you have equal amounts on front and back, and all the ends. Be aware of all the creases in the meat and get the seasoning in there–the salt needs to be in here to make sure that all surface areas are covered in adequate salt. (If you are using the bag method, it’s easiest and cleanest to put the pork belly in the bag and season it in the bag. Seal up the bag once you’re finished.)
Close your bag/container and place the pork belly in the fridge.
For 7 whole days, flip the bacon over once in the morning and once in the evening.
Once the 7 days are up, can remove the cured bacon from the fridge or let it continue curing for a few additional days.
Remove the bacon from the bag/container and rinse off your pork belly. (See below for “Rinsing Advice”.)
Now you will low and slow cook or smoke the pork belly, depending on what equipment you have available at your home. If all you have is your oven, set your oven on the lowest possible setting and cook the pork belly until you reach the internal temperature of 165°F. (See Below for “Cooking Options” to hear about the other ways you can cook/smoke the bacon.)
Once you’ve reached the correct internal temperature, you will remove it from the heat source and put it on a plate/tray and cover it with foil and let the pork belly come to room temperature. (See “Tenting Options” below.)
The room temperature pork belly can now be put in the fridge overnight. (See “Cutting Options” below)
Slice the pork belly into the thickness of bacon you prefer, whether thick or thin.
You now have bacon!!!
Use this bacon just as you would with the bacon you’ve previously purchased from the butcher or local grocery store. If you are anything like my family, you will turn into a bacon snob and prefer the slices that you made over the store bought ones.
Rinsing Advice
This rinsing stage is going to look a little different for you depending on what type of salt that you chose to use.
As I mentioned above, my family likes the rock salt because we lean to the savory side of the food world, instead of the salty side. A generous rinsing off of the curing seasoning will leave a mild saltiness to it. A quicker rinse off is the maximum limit of our salt preference, but the starting off point for some of our family members.
If you choose to use a fine salt, a quick rinse is going to leave you with a salt bomb. (I did this once and that bacon was quickly reserved for soups and stews, and I don’t add any of the recipe’s called for salt. This bacon took care of the salt seasoning for the entire dish.) A generous rinse is what I consider a salt lover would prefer. But if you’re like our family of salt-less-is-more camp, but only have fine salt, I recommend filling a large bowl with clean water and letting the pork belly sit it for about a half hour or so. This is not going to undo the curing at all, but it will keep you from puckering from too-salty.
This is one ingredient that no one can tell you how to handle it, because everyone’s preferences are going to be all over the spectrum. So hopefully this section helps assists you in making salt choices that reflect your personal seasoning preference.
Advertisements
Cooking Options
We have cooked our pork bellies on our Traeger Grill and in a proper smoker. Both of these other cooking sources are great options, but our personal favorite is the smoker.
When it comes to grills, whether charcoal or propane, you want to use indirect heat. Even on the lowest setting/heat, it’s going to cook your bacon. This step should take no less than 3 hours. We are talking low and slow. And if you want to add that element of smoke flavor to your bacon, you can use a smoking chamber on your grill, like the one I have a link to below.
If you have a Traeger, or other grill that is a combo smoker, you want to keep your grill on the smoke setting and let the smoke cook your pork belly. It’s been a while since my husband smoked bacon on our Traeger, but he remembers it taking about 3-4 hours. Remember, this isn’t about time as much as it is about reaching that temperature of 165°F using just the heat from the smoke.
My husband loves the smoker that he found on a community “Free” page. This one allows you to customize your meat smoking experience better than a smoker/grill combo unit. His advice for using this cooking option is to soak your wood chips. At a bare minimum you soak them for 30 minutes, but 30-60 minutes is good. And in my ear, my husband is saying, “Do not soak grill pellets!” You definitely want the wood chips. And even with soaked chips, you still want to keep a tray of water in your smoker with your chips and meat. It keeps the humidity just right to keep the juices in your bacon.
The other advice that my husband popped in to give, is that if for whatever reason your pork belly just won’t come to temperature don’t worry. All you have to do is put it in your oven (lowest setting) and finish cooking it to 165°F.
Tenting Options
While this step can be omitted, you might consider to keeping it in your procedure. The tenting helps keep the steam in, instead of evaporating away while it cools down. My husband advocates that this is the secret that keeps his bacon from drying out.
If you want to tent your bacon but don’t want to use foil, you can use your lidded container (just don’t seal it).
Cutting Options
Here is where my husband and I have a slight difference of opinion. I have absolutely no problem slicing my bacon by hand. I’ve been slicing sandwich bread for over 3 years now, so I have a steady hand for this sort of thing. My husband prefers a meat slicer. Knife or machine, I’m an advocate for using what you have on hand.
We both do agree that letting the pork belly rest over night in the fridge is a huge step in your favor. If you slice your bacon at room temperature, you will more than likely find that it shifts on you and your blade slides out of place. By cooling the pork belly over night in the refrigerator, it firms the meat up and makes the slicing that much easier.
Why is it important to cure the pork belly for 7 days?
Depending on who you talk to, or where you look up information, you’re going to find a wide spectrum of curing time as an answer. But before I answer this question I want to make sure we’re on the same page about why we cure meat, in this case bacon.
All throughout history meat has been cured to preserve meat in a time before refrigeration was invented. In fact, many countries today still depend on curing to preserve meat. The enemy of meat (and food in general) is exposure to water, light, and heat. These three things degrade food, promote bacterial growth, and increase the chances of food borne illnesses. Salt is an amazing ingredient, because it changes (in this case) meat in such a way that water is removed and it creates an environment that bacteria does not like or live in.
In fact, in another scenario, I have the perfect example. The yeast that I use to make my bread, when I neglect it, starts to grow bacteria. The whole yeast culture is thrown off and smells horrible. However, this is the culture of wild yeast starter. You have a community here. When the community gets out of balance you have to make changes to bring it back into balance and make the community happy again. Salt does this. I toss in 2 tsp of salt into my out of balance starter, give it a good stir, and by the next day all is right in the world of my wild yeast starter. What happened? The salt changed the environment of the starter. The bacteria became unhappy and quit reproducing. Mean while, the yeast became happy and began to populate again or recovered from its illness (or however you want to look at it.)
Now a pork belly is so much larger than my quart size mason jar of yeast starter. It’s a thriving metropolis in comparison. It takes much longer for salt to infiltrate that pork belly and withdraw the water content of the belly. It takes time for the meat to cure and stabilize itself to withstand the threats to food preservation.
I saw one site say that it takes up to 24 hours to cure bacon using their method. The difference is that they have to inject the salt in deep throughout the pork belly. This method is not using an injection method. It is the meat bringing in the salt, and the salt working its way into the center of the belly. This takes time.
any2ndnow.com
There was another site that I saw claim that it only took 3 days to reach a “mild” cure. Food science being science, either it’s cured or it’s not cured. Cured meat is a process. It is a method. And the proof is behind the results on how the meat holds up over time. There’s nothing wrong with making salted pork. It doesn’t make it cured. It just means that it has a higher salt content that the meat that you pull out of your fridge or freezer. Please, let’s just call salted pork by its rightful name.
Can bacon be cured longer than 7 days? Absolutely! It’s not going to dry your pork belly out unless you’re using an open container. But that only happens because your fridge naturally evaporates water out of food that is left in there without being covered.
And let’s just be clear that evaporation or dehydration is not curing. Dehydration/evaporation is one method of preserving that is purely unique. Curing is an entirely different method of preservation, unique to itself. Every method has its own rules. Anything that doesn’t follow the rules is a different method for a different purpose.
I wanted to mention all of this because there were some friends of ours that we walked through the steps of how we cure our bacon. They stopped the curing step at three days and didn’t find the results that we said they should expect. There’s a couple of reasons why their first attempt of curing bacon didn’t turn out, so I can’t write definitively here what went wrong. I do know that we had shared from the same pork belly and the bacon had turned out with the above method. The two biggest suspicions I have is that not all the cuts and groves in the pork belly so the majority of the belly was working on becoming cured, but there were spots where bacteria had the opportunity to grow because the salt wasn’t there to make the meat an uninhabitable environment.
The other big potential of what went wrong is that the salt did not make it into the center of the meat. This is an important issue because remember, we are cooking low and slow. And since the center of meat is the last place to “cook”, this becomes a prime breeding ground for all sorts of potential food problems because salt wasn’t there to keep in check bad cultures. This then comes into realm of poor food handling.
I know that it’s tempting to take short cuts or speed things along quicker than described. We’ve all been there, especially when we’re excited to try a new skill and have great expectations. Please know that no matter how tempting it is, curing meats does take time. It can’t be rushed. And if you don’t believe me, you have to check out the link I have below for 2 Guys & A Cooler. They have amazing methods for making so many different cured meats that I can’t wait to get cracking to try. And what you see there just confirms what I’m saying that great meats take time.
Advertisements
Here are other recipes you may be interested in.
If you’re looking for a Beef Bacon (bypassing the pork all together), this is the recipe that I recommend. Disclosure, I have not tried this recipe yet. But this is the one that I have on hold for when I make that plunge.
If you’re interested in a Pastrami Recipe, this is the one that I have bookmarked.
2 Guys & A Cooler is definitely worth subscribing to if you’re looking at many other ways of curing meat. This link takes you to their video on making Biltong. I like their presentation because it all makes sense after making our own bacon for several years now.
This post contains affiliate links to products. We may receive a commissions on products purchased through these links, but at no extra cost to you. These items listed here are from Amazon but may be purchased at local markets.
If a smoker is not in your budget, this might be the tool to meet your needs.
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.
Advertisements
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!
Advertisements
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.
Advertisements
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???
Products used today:
This post contains affiliate links to products. We may receive a commissions on products purchased through these links, but at no extra cost to you. These items listed here are from Amazon but may be purchased at local markets.
How I Can Do That 
Leave a comment