My Garlic Is Sprouting! What Should I do? How To Make Your Own Garlic Powder.

Garlic begins to sprout when it gets too cold.

Remove the sprout from the garlic clove before slicing.

Sliced garlic on a Teflex sheet ready to dehydrate.

Dried garlic chips in a VitaMix "dry" container.

Sift to separate dried minced garlic from garlic powder.

Sifted garlic powder.

Dried garlic chips, minced garlic and garlic powder.

My Garlic is Sprouting!

My husband and I went on vacation and to save energy, we shut off the furnace. We live in California so we weren't too worried about our pipes freezing. But what we forgot was that garlic starts to sprout when it gets too cold. We had our 200 heads of garlic that we harvested this spring in the house and we were unpleasantly surprised to find about 1/3 of them sprouting when we got home. I had already planted all the garlic that I needed for next season and it was a bit too late to prepare another bed anyway. What on earth was I going to do with all of this sprouting garlic?

When Life Hands You Lemons.....

What's that old expression? When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. So, when life hands you sprouting garlic, why not make garlic powder? I've always wanted to try making my own garlic powder. It always annoyed me to grow hundreds of heads of garlic and then go buy a jar of garlic powder. But I never wanted to waste a beautiful, fresh head of garlic to do this. Finally, here was my chance!

How to Dry and Process Garlic

1. Break the garlic heads into individual cloves

2. Remove the skin, cut off the bottom root area and slice the clove in half vertically, exposing the green sprout.

3. Remove the green sprout intact and slice the remaining garlic into 1/4 inch slices.

4. Place slices on a Teflex sheet and dehydrate at 105 degrees F until crisp.

5. Fill the bottom of a blender about 2 inches with dehydrated garlic slices. I used a VitaMix "dry" container but I believe any good blender will work.

6. Process in the blender until you have the desired consistency. If you want some "minced" garlic granules, stop before everything is processed into powder.

7. Sift the contents of the blender through a strainer. The sifted garlic can be used for garlic powder and what you catch in the strainer can be used as larger granulated or minced garlic.

8. To make garlic salt, mix the garlic powder with fine salt in a ratio of one part garlic to 4 parts salt.

9. Either continue this process until you've used all the dehydrated chips or store the remaining chips in a jar until you need them.