Making Great Garlic Powder

Those of you who have read this blog for long know that I grow garlic and I process it into garlic powder, which I sell to garlic lovin’ folks all over the country. I’ve been doing this for several years and it’s a nice little home business. You can make garlic powder on a small scale for yourself, as gifts for friends and family, or as a small home business like I do.

In this blog essay I’m going to tell and show you how I convert my homegrown garlic bulbs into flavorful garlic powder. Before I begin to tell and show you the process of making great garlic powder, I want to make sure you know about the other garlic-related internet photo-essays I’ve written:

How I Plant My Garlic
Making Pickled Garlic Scapes
Harvesting Garlic 2007
Curing Garlic Bulbs
Selling My Garlic Powder At The Farm Market

Okay then... LET'S MAKE SOME GARLIC POWDER:

We begin (picture below) with garlic bulbs. These bulbs are the same ones I planted and harvested in the photo essays above.



The bulbs have been cured and I have stored them in net bags. Before I can proceed, I need to clean the bulbs. Washing is not practical. What I do is simply remove the dirty bulb wrappers. I say simply but sometimes it is not easily done. The toothbrush you see in the picture helps.

The next thing I do is cut the bottom and top of each bulb off (photo below). I do this with a sharp knife on a cutting board. Then I arrange the bulbs on my dehydrator trays. The idea here is that the bulbs go into the dehydrator for a few hours in order to loosen the skin around each clove.



I have two electric food dehydrators. One is an older Equi-Flow unit and the other is a newer Excalibur. This next picture shows the Equi-Flow full of bulbs. I had to remove every other tray in order to get enough “headroom” for the bulbs.



After a few hours in the dehydrator, I take the trays out and separate the cloves from the wrappers. This is easily done but it is, nevertheless, time consuming work. The picture below was taken by me at 2:00 in the morning. My family was all sound asleep and I was working away while watching a documentary movie called Broken Limbs on my laptop computer. The guy on the screen is Grant Gibbs, an organic, sustainable farmer out in Washington State. The movie wasn’t about Grant Gibbs but he was clearly the star. I wish there was a movie about this man. We who are interested in small-scale sustainable agriculture could learn a lot from him. I actually e-mailed the director of the movie to ask if he had plans to do a movie about Grant. He agreed it would make a great movie but there was no plan to do a movie about him. I wish the guy would write a book or something.

Anyway, as I am taking the wrappers off the garlic cloves, I am inspecting each one for any kind of blemish. If I find a bad clove, I throw it away. If there is just a small bad spot on a clove, I cut it out. Do you think the big factories where they make garlic powder for the grocery stores of the world scrutinize every single clove for perfection?



By the way, not visible in the above picture is a large cardboard box under the table. Every so often, I sweep the bulb wrappers into the box. The clean cloves go into the colander. When all the cloves have been “undressed” it is time to slice them. This next picture shows an inexpensive food processor in the background, bowls of cloves, and a stack of drying trays.



The food processor with a slicing blade makes short work of slicing. The slices are then layered thickly onto the dehydrator trays (picture below).



The trays are placed into the dehydrators. This next shot shows two dehydrators full. Once again, I have removed every other tray to provide headroom for the thick layers of garlic.



Because the slices are layered so thick on the trays, I need to remove them (after maybe 12 to 16 hours of drying) and reposition them on the trays. This exposes new surface areas and speeds up the drying time. As the next picture shows, I dump the partially-dried garlic slices into a stainless steel tray. The Excalibur dehydrator has a removable mesh sheet that the garlic doesn’t stick to. A very nice feature.



After a couple days of drying, the slices are dry enough to break when you bend them. They then go from the trays directly into gallon-size glass jars and the lids are screwed down tight.



I store the jars of dried garlic slices in my cool pantry until I am ready to grind them into powder. I use a Vita-Mix 4000 blender to do the grinding (visible in the next picture). I bought the blender used on Ebay. What a machine! I’ve been told you can feed a 2x4 board down into it and it will grind it to powder. I believe it. When I first started making garlic powder, I used a regular kitchen blender. Such appliances will do the job. But they do not do it as fast and as easily as a Vita-Mix.

Some stainless steel bowls are needed too. In the one bowl you can see a rabbit-ear kitchen strainer. That particular strainer is an older model that I use only for making garlic powder. I have used newer strainers but don’t like the size of granules they sift. The older strainer allows a mixture of powder and fine granules through. I like the mix of tiny granules with the powder, and my customers have told me they like that too.



The next picture shows a top-down view into the Vita-Mix. You can see that the dried slices have been thoroughly powderized.



Then I sift the contents of the blender through the strainer.



The powder sifts through very quickly and there will always be a few larger granules that don’t make it through (as you can see in the next picture). I just put those back in the blender with the next load of chips. The Vita-Mx will easily grind ¼ of a gallon of chips at a time.



One gallon of dried garlic slices will grind down to about a half a gallon of powder, as this next picture shows. As soon as the powder is ground and sifted, it goes into the jar and the lid is tightened down. The chips and powder are not left exposed to the air for any length of time.



As I mentioned in the beginning of this essay, I have a garlic powder business. I sell the powder in jars and bags. Jars are more expensive than bags but they look a lot nicer. I call them gift jars. I have a nice label on the front and another label with my address and such goes on the back. By the way, I could put the powder in plastic jars and save money. But plastic says “Cheap” and that isn’t the kind of message I want to convey. I worked hard to get this powder from bulb to powder. It is a top-quality product. I put it in a quality container. And the jars have a shaker lid under the green cap. Here’s a picture of the jars and labels.



One option I offer is a gift box for the jars of powder. The jar is wrapped in bubble wrap and tucked into the box. I also include an information sheet telling all about my garlic powder and what makes it so special. The information sheet goes out with all jars of powder I sell (even if they aren’t boxed). Here’s a picture (below)showing the gift box and info sheet. You may notice that the one jar has a shrink-wrap collar around the top. I put the collar on and use a heat gun to shrink it tight. I think people feel better about a jar of powder with a seal on it.



For value-minded customers, who have their own spice jars, I also offer my garlic powder in bags. I weigh three ounces of the powder into food-grade ziplock bags, as shown below.



Since little baggies of garlic powder don’t look very attractive, I put them in a plain tin-tie bag with a simple (but nice) label on the outside. And I tuck an info sheet in every bag. I sell these tin-tie bags in 3-ounce and 6-ounce size (see photo below).



So there you have it. Bulbs to powder to package. Here’s a “glamour shot” of the garlic powder as I sell it:



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For more specific details about making great garlic powder, I recommend, The Complete Guide To Making Great Garlic Powder: Homegrown and Homemade Secrets From a Garlic Powder Guru. The book is small but chock full of useful and inspiring information on the subject of not only making garlic powder, but growing great garlic. It is also available fromCumberland Books.

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If you think you might like to grow garlic and make your own garlic powder as a small business, I invite you to read my essay titled: Home Based Agrarian Enterprises & Garlic Powder Profits