roasted. garlic. powder.

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.