How to prepare and store ready-to-use garlic in bulk.

Cross-post from /r/GarlicLovers.

One of the most irritating things about garlic is preparing it for each and every meal. The shelling of a dozen or two cloves. The cutting or grating. Takes an inordinately long time - why not just make a massive batch at once, and pull what you need whenever you need it?

Ingredients

• Garlic, 1Kg
• Olive, Avocado, Graepeseed or any other high-quality oil.

Directions

1. I typically start with a 1Kg bag of garlic. These come from China, and while I would normally worry about any food coming from China, at least it’s cheap. A year ago it was just a little over $2CDN for a 1Kg bag, but now it’s spiked to nearly $5CDN thanks to the garlic shortage. Fuck me, no? I go through about a kilo a month, easy. My Cæsar salads just aren’t good unless I’m dripping sweat and tears by the halfway mark. Same with my spaghetti Bolognese. And my… well, you get the point. Thankfully my employment is mostly solitary, with no direct public interaction.
2. I have never had luck with the “two metal bowls” method of shelling garlic. For me, the only way to do it is to peel and cut off the hard base of each clove individually. I twist the clove to get the paper off just a bit easier; “cracking” the clove is IMHO a slow and arduous method but at least it works. YMMV.
3. Once I have the entire 1Kg bag cut and stripped (takes about 2-3 hrs for me), I then pull out my food processor. You can use any, but make sure it’s a higher quality one that can run for many minutes without burning out or overheating. Use the blade tool, if yours has more than one tool.
4. Pour the garlic in so that it reaches the maximum recommended fill level. Then take a really nice oil, such as Cold Pressed Olive oil, Grapeseed oil or Avocado oil. Fill the container up with that oil until it reaches the top of the garlic.
5. Now, blend. Blend, blend blend that fucker! Blend until it is a gooey paste. If you have any larger chunkies sticking to the sides of the container, stop the blender and push them back down into the garlic paste with a spatula. Now blend some more to make sure you have caught any remaining chunkies. If necessary, pour more oil in to ensure your paste sorta-collapses to the bottom of the container when you stop your blades -- too stiff and it won’t properly process any large chunks that are still in there, they’ll just bounce off the blades. The paste needs to be pretty gloopy and sticky to grab hold of larger chunks and hold them in place for the blades to slice.

I use a terrine to store my garlic, and I prefer Le Parfait because they make the highest-quality terrines on the market. If you are in Canada and have a Marshalls, Homesense or Winners in your area, haunt that place like a mofo; they often get in dribs and drabs of Le Parfait every few months at ridiculously low prices. Like a 1L for $6.99, where you can pay $30+ on eBay and that’s before shipping. Homesense will be your best bet, Marshalls the worst.

Whatever container you use, try to avoid plastics; because even though yours might say “BPA Free” you need to understand that BPA is just one of thousands of known obseogens and endocrine disruptors that can leach into your food. Only ever use plastic for dry foods! The next best thing is to use a glass jar, even a normal Bernardin preserving jar would be excellent.

So 1Kg of garlic will, on average, make about 1.5L of ground garlic paste. You can thank the oil for the volumetric increase. This means it works great in salads, in the skillet as a pre-searing oil, and in almost any other dish you would normally put garlic in anyhow. You can even spread it on sandwiches like butter! I would recommend storing it in 2-3 containers, typically 500-750ml apiece, and put one at the back of your refrigerator and the rest in the freezer. Each will last about a month in the fridge before it starts getting this really weird (but safe) fluorescent shade of green and loosing most of its bite. The flavour is still there, but the bite won’t be.

Final note: Unless you absolutely adore coconut, stay the fuck away from coconut oil. I prepared my garlic with that shit once, and I still have it in the freezer (thankfully it was a much smaller batch). About the only thing it’s good for is to prepare a pan for a good meat searing. The taste of the coconut will absolutely overwhelm any normal dish you stick it in. I pretty well gagged on my Cæsar salad when I used that one.

Good luck, and may you always reek of garlic!

bon appetit