Roasted Garlic Powder: Perfect For Sous Vide Cooking

-

I have always used garlic powder.  I am pretty heavy handed with it.  It used to be my salt.  After starting to cook sous vide, that love has been rekindled.  This is because most advice around sous vide discourages the use of fresh garlic.  According to baldwind:
"Finally, raw garlic produces very pronounced and unpleasant results and powdered garlic (in very small quantities) should be substituted."

After reading that, I set out to make garlic powder.  It is ridiculously simple, and like all things culinary, when you can control it, you can make it better.  In this case, you have three major wins:
  1. Before you begin making garlic powder, you can control the quality of the garlic.  Like most spices you buy, it is hard to determine original quality and how long it has been deteriorating on a grocery shelf or storeroom.
  2. Roasting.  You can bring the noise by roasting the garlic.  When you compare the aroma and flavor of your homemade roasted garlic to whatever you have been buying at the piggly wiggly, you will start using your old garlic powder to soak up paint and oil spills (see sawdust uses).
  3. Finally, you can also choose how finely ground you want to grind the garlic, letting you control the speed of absorption and flavor release.

Making roasted garlic powder is unbelievably simple:
  1. Start with four (4) heads of awesome, fresh garlic.  Again, this is one of the huge wins of doing this yourself.  Don't f*ck around.
  2. Roast them.  Use your favorite recipe.  Or google it.  Really its wrapping the heads in foil, possibly slicing the top off and drizzling olive oil.  Just add heat and time.  I use 350F.  Garlic should be soft and a caramel color on the outside.
  3. Squeeze it out.  I try to keep it all whole just because it is easier to deal with.  This part tends to take me the most amount of active time.
  4. If you used olive oil, place them on some towels.  The goal here is to try and absorb some of the oil on the surface of the garlic.  Keeping them whole makes this step way easier.
  5. Dehydrate.  You can use your oven on its lowest setting or a dehydrator.  The dehydrator takes like a day or maybe longer.  Usually at some point, I chop up the whole garlic cloves to increase the exposed garlic surface area so that dehydration happens faster.  
  6. Grind to your desired fineness.  Sometimes after I do this step it doesn't feel dry enough.  If it still feels wet, GOTO 5.
Go forth and do this now.

Comments

  1. the garlic guyApril 8, 2011 at 12:27 PM

    Personaly, i dont like garlic powder, it tastes great, but the benefits are missing, not like the raw one. Thanks for the explanations.

    ReplyDelete
  2. CraigJuly 20, 2011 at 1:14 PM

    I just got a Sous Vide Demi and am dying to try this out. Do you use a dedicated grinder? Might I be able to do it with my Mexican molcajete? (Stone mortar and pestle.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. pescolarJuly 20, 2011 at 2:04 PM

    @Craig:

    I used a dedicated grinder. While I think its possible to do with a molcajete, I'm hesitant to recommend it. If you do use it, i'd also recommend running the end result through a strainer to get out bigger pieces (and then try grinding those up again).

    If you go this route, let us know how it goes!

    ReplyDelete
  4. CraigJuly 31, 2011 at 10:06 PM

    I ended up getting a Krupps coffee grinder, as Cook's Illustrated said it was the best spice grinder. I think my powder turned out really well, but there are some parts that didn't go as expected.

    I chose not to drizzle any oil. I just lopped the tops off, wrapped them in foil, and gave them an hour at 350. When it came time to squeeze out the garlic it was like extruding garlic toothpaste. No whole cloves came out at all. Perhaps I didn't lop off enough of the top?

    I put cheesecloth on the perforated tray that comes with my Gaggenau oven, set it at 130 dry, and let it go about a day. It dried pretty well, although the bigger pieces were a tad gummy, and much of it remained firmly glued to the cheesecloth.

    As I ground it I kept passing it through a strainer to separate the fine powder, and re-ground the larger chunks. Then I spread the result on a pan and dried it another hour at 135 for good measure.

    All in all a success, but I lost a fair amount to the cheesecloth. I'm open to suggestions.

    Thanks for the recipe! I'm looking forward to cooking with this stuff.

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousDecember 2, 2014 at 2:22 PM

    Craig I know way old thread but I was using google and it showed up. So I figured I should comment on the cheese cloth thing I used that the first time I dryed roasted garlic big mistake use parchment paper works great . I roast for 1 hour at 350 let cool squeeze out the garlic then mash and spread out onto parchment paper dry until brittle grind sift the bigger chunks I regrind and sift again anything left after that I toss.

    ReplyDelete
  6. CraigDecember 3, 2014 at 12:53 AM

    Parchment paper makes much more sense. And this may set a record for the longest gap between comment and reply! Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 3Boy MomFebruary 15, 2020 at 9:14 PM

      8.5 yrs after your original post, I have to ask, have you tried the parchment? It works great!

      Delete
  7. pescolarDecember 3, 2014 at 2:39 AM

    That was awesome. Just awesome!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Escolar: The World's Most Dangerous Fish

-
Image
Escolar is the most controversial fish that you are likely to find in your fish market. This firm, white fleshed fish has an incredibly rich flavor, often described as 'succulent', or a fattier version of swordfish. Why so rich? It turns out that Escolar's diet contains food high in wax esters. Wax esters that are really difficult for Escolar to digest. As a result, these esters build up in the fish. Where is the controversy in a buttery, delicious fish? I would say it is in the laxative like effect it has on a certain percentage of the population. Well, a 'laxative like effect' is how my fish monger described it. Others would describe it as closer to diahhrea. An expert would call it 'keriorrhoea'. Literally translated, it means 'flow of wax'. Oily orange droplets pouring out your pooper.  Keriorrhoea occurs because the wax esters in the flesh of the fish pool up in your intestine. Some reports of Escolar related illness include cramp
Read more

White Tuna Explained (Escolar vs. Albacore)

-
Image
I am not the first person on the Internet to tell you that White Tuna is a confusing order at the sushi bar.  While there are a host of fish that can be mislabeled as White Tuna, the two most common ones are the Albacore Tuna and our dreaded and delicious friend, the Escolar . What Is White Tuna? I worked really hard to source both fish in a raw form so that I could bring you pictures.  And by 'worked really hard', I really mean: I would keep going to the same fishmonger and ask them if they had Escolar and Albacore.  Escolar isn't very difficult to find but Albacore can be problematic.  Finally, I found some at the Lobster Place  in Chelsea Market. So, let's take a quick look:
Read more

Cheap Skate (i8P)

-
Image
I generally shy away from fish that is on sale at any fishmonger. The only reason I can think of for reducing the price of something is because you want to get rid of it. And there are only two reasons you are trying to get rid of something. You have more than you want of it or there is something wrong with it. But, you know, I was at Whole Foods. I figured that whatever I was purchasing couldn't be that bad. So, with that rationalization trumping my better judgement, I purchased two pounds of skate. Skates are bottom dwelling Chondrichthyes, similar to Rays, like a Sting Ray, Manta Ray or Sugar Ray (Well, at least the bottom dwelling part). Which you don't really think of as delicious. But it can be. My issue with Skate is that it is alway prepared the same way. Brown butter, capers and a squeeze of lemon. Awesome the first time, horrifically boring the umpteenth time. However, I had an idea in my head (ideas that I have in my pancreas I don't usually act on) th
Read more