Rutkowski Farm

To the left is a hazy picture (thank you cell phone) of garlic chips that were dehydrated for about 18 hours at 120°F.  I’ve made several batches over the winter, but this particular batch is a bit of a breakthrough for me.  This go around I tried to see if I could cut down the processing time in a significant way.  Past batches have taken me hours and hours to process because I spent a LOT of time shelling the garlic prior to drying.

In the past, I more or less followed the path set out by Herrick Kimball.  His book on making garlic powder is great and there are purportedly only a few left directly from him.  But I’m never content with set processes and usually feel the need to tinker around the edges.  One big problem I had with his process was that my dehydrator does not have deep enough trayspace to accommodate whole heads like he uses for his initial drying step.  I tried various things including soaking the cloves in hot water for 2 minutes to loosen the sheath.  That was messy and probably only marginally faster.  Another issue I had was the slicing blade on my food processor.  Simply put, I found it didn’t make a clean slice.  Some of the garlic got pulped and a lot got stuck in funny places inside the food processor.  I used a knife instead.  This slowed things down significantly.

Last night that all changed.  I decided to make a small batch with some of my remaining (halfway decent) garlic.  Yeah..I’m finding it pretty incredible that I still have garlic that’s ok at this point of the year, but it gives me something to experiment with.  So what did I do?

1. I bought one of these at A Different Drummer’s Kitchen in Albany.   This was a case where I knew exactly what I wanted, but had my doubts as to whether someone made it.  In this case a strawberry slicer makes a fine garlic slicer.  This sped things up significantly.  I did find that it worked better with smaller cloves which solves another problem for me.  I never quite know what to do with all of the smaller stock that comes out of the field.  I’d always prefer to sell the bigger stuff which means I tend to end up with a bunch of small stuff at the end of the season.
2. I didn’t bother to remove the shell of the garlic.  It all went in the dehydrator with the garlic.   I’ve been reading The Contrary Farmer by Gene Logsdon.  This guy is my new hero.  A lot of his wisdom comes down to keeping things small, simple and smart.  In my case, I asked myself why I was removing the shell.  There’s a perfectly good (and much faster) process called winnowing that has been used for centuries for this exact task.  So once it was all dry, I took 2 large bowls and poured it from one to the other in front of a window fan I set up on my porch.  And yep. It worked and probably took me 1/100th of the time it would have taken to pull the shell off of each clove.

Now there is one step I will do the next time around and that’s cutting off the bottoms of the cloves.  I skipped it as a time saving measure, but I think that it should be added back in.

In any case, I think it was a success!