One Way to Preserve Garlic

Did you grow a fair amount of garlic last year? Are you wondering how you’ll use it up before it becomes bitter? Well, here’s a simple way to preserve garlic for future use.

When garlic is put into storage — in our case, down in our cool basement — the cloves eventually develop a sprout in the center, which can be quite bitter. One solution is to trim it out while you’re cutting up a clove for a cooking project.

However, my husband Bill came up with a great solution and I just had to share it with you. He is quite the garlic aficionado and grows several varieties of garlic each year. But there always seems to be a rush during the winter to finish using the cloves before they either become bitter or shrivel up. Bill’s solution is to roast and freeze them for future use.

Here’s what he did: for most of our garlic cloves, he peeled them and set them into a large bowl. The remainder of our garlic harvest was still together the bulbs, which he left as-is.

Next, he drizzled olive oil over the cloves and bulbs and stirred everything so they were well-coated with the oil. Bill placed all of the garlic into baking pans and covered the pans with foil so the garlic would steam as it roasted.

The pans went into a 350-degree F. oven for 30 minutes. At that point, Bill stirred everything again, and returned the pans to the oven for another 30 minutes. Then we let everything cool down.

At that point, I filled small snack-size bags with about 12 cloves each and set them aside. I also took the whole garlic bulbs that Bill roasted and “squeezed” the individual cloves out of their skins and put them into bags, too.

I set aside about a dozen cloves and put them into a covered glass container in the refrigerator so they would be handy for adding to dishes this week.

I put all of the snack-size bags into a gallon-size heavy-duty freezer bag (Ziploc), labeled the bag, and then decided to double-bag it… just to prevent any garlic “fragrance” from sneaking out. I then put the gallon bag into our freezer.

Having about a dozen cloves packed into individual small bags will make it very easy to just grab and thaw out a bag, rather than having to attempt to break off a chunk of garlic cloves from a big block of them. Our game plan is to transfer one small bag of frozen garlic into our refrigerator each week for that week’s cooking projects. Pretty simple, eh?