Dehydrated Garlic Powder and Minced Garlic

A friend grew too much garlic last year and here it is spring and she wanted to get rid of a bunch!  I bought it off of her for 50 cents a bulb.  They were really big too!  And Organic!  However, they had tiny sprouts on them so I needed to do something with all of it fast.  I borrowed another friend's dehydrator and got to work!  I was not disappointed with how this turned out!

I started off with 20 giant bulbs of garlic and peeled them all.

Then I sliced them all up.  Not paper thin, just ..... sliced them and kept them as uniformly the same size as possible and laid them out on the trays.

I did not let the scraps go to waste!  I put them in a pot of chicken bone broth I had going at the time.

 





Then I dehydrated the garlic at 95 degrees for approximately 10 hours.  That time will vary depending on thickness.  Also, you could crank up the temp a bit too, but I set it up and went to bed.

Once it was dried, I then just put it in my little food chopper and whizzed it up.  I used a mesh strainer to sort out the pieces from the powder.  I then put the pieces of garlic back in, added more garlic, and whizzed some more.  Once I got tired of all that whizzing, I deemed some minced garlic and the rest garlic powder.

I then stored it in glass jars with lids.  I considered adding a few grains of rice to absorb any moisture, sort of like you do with your salt shaker, but I decided I'd first wait and see if I had any clumping issues first.  So far I've not.  It's been over a week and it's still nice and powdery.  But there's always that option too.

I went on to do the same with my onions!  It's so awesome to make a recipe and just grab a handful of dried garlic and onions and toss them in instead of having to peel and slice!  It makes whipping something up even easier!

Enjoy!