The Trouble With Garlic

Despite loving to eat garlic, we haven't grown it in our garden for the last several years.  I have a love-hate relationship with garlic.  I love to eat it and grow it, but I hate curing it and storing it.  Here's what generally happens.  The garlic grows and is finally ready to harvest.  I follow all the directions and then harvest it.  I lay it out with plenty of air flow, with fans blowing on it.  Since it is harvested in a time with high humidity, the garlic doesn't cure or dry.  In fact, a lot of it gets soft, starts smelling and goes bad.  It is so aggravating.  After failing yet again, I decided to not plant it anymore.

But I learned something that I should've already known and now I'm willing to give it another try.  I'll be planting on 10/1.  Garlic is a loooooooooooong crop to grow.  210 days to maturity.  

I ordered some softneck garlic.  That's the variety that works best in South Louisiana.  I also ordered some Elephant Garlic.  It came in the mail earlier this week.

The thing I'm going to do differently this year is after I harvest it, I'm going to do my best to cure it, but before it starts going bad, I'm going to break up the cloves and put them in this little device and roll it around to take the "paper" off the garlic clove.

Then once all the cloves are broken off and "paper" removed, I'll do the step that I hadn't been doing and allowed the garlic in the past to go bad.

We'll put the garlic cloves in a mason jar and freeze it.  

When we're ready to cook with it, which is in most every recipe, we'll pop out what we need.  In the past, Tricia used her Pampered Chef garlic press to mince the garlic.  Lately, she just uses a grater to grate the garlic into the dish.  Good stuff!  Hopefully, this method will allow us to preserve the garlic we grow.  We'll be planting soon and in roughly 210 days, we'll report back on the garlic harvest and if we're successful in saving it.