This past week I found time to tackle several pickling projects. For one thing, I have been wanting to make pickled garlic ever since I read Lynn’s post about it on her blog. I am looking for ways to preserve our garlic, and to be able to enjoy it for a longer period of time. Last year’s harvest was all shriveled up by late March, which left us with (sob) several months of NO GARLIC! Pickling is one way to make the garlic last longer.
pickled garlic
I am also going to try freezing some whole cloves of garlic and see how that works. I know the texture will change, but hopefully the flavor will still be there after thawing out.
Back on the pickling front, I also had some pepperoncini peppers ready to pickle. We don’t eat a lot of these peppers, so I only planted one plant. But even with one plant, there are usually a lot of peppers, so I like to pickle some of them. I didn’t process these in a boiling water bath, since they will stay in the refrigerator and be eaten within a month or so. For them I used a recipe for pickled peppers from my Ball Blue Book. For whole peppers like this I always cut a slit in them to allow the pickling solution to get inside the pepper, and to keep them from floating. This variety of pepperoncini is larger than what you usually see pickled at the grocery store.
And when cucumbers are available fresh from the garden like they are now we always have a batch of refrigerator pickles to munch on. I made these with rice wine vinegar, sugar, canola oil and a little salt.
After the pickles are made comes the hardest part for me – waiting until they are ready to taste! I won’t open the garlic for several months, but the pepperoncinis will be ready in about a week. And by the time you read this, those cucumber pickles may already be history!
I’m planning on planting garlic in the garden next year. I wonder if you roast the garlic before freezing, if it will thaw/taste better? Never thought of pickling them! We have been pickling our banana peppers in a sweet rine because we have so many this year.
Hubby and I take a slightly different approach with garlic. We mince it, put it in containers and then cover it with olive oil. Then we freeze it. I was able to get 10 pounds of garlic last summer and this is what we did with it. The containers were about 1 cup size and fit in the refrigerator really easy when we took them out to use. This way we had the minced garlic and the olive oil that goes in the pan first for most of our meals all ready to go. Having a hubby who is half Italian and loves to cook is great, he is also half Scottish and also loves to save, this works for both.
Tastes like fresh minced garlic to me in olive oil of course.
I’ve heard of others that do it this way also. I may experiment with this method, maybe do a half pint or so of minced garlic with oil. We do use a lot of garlic and olive oil in the same dishes, so this would work well I think.
Thanks for stopping by!
great idea to pickle the garlic!
just a thought for those ‘shriveled’ cloves in March. dry them out and grind them up for a garlic powder!
That is a great idea. I’ll bet homemade garlic powder tastes better than store-bought!
I think pickling garlic is a great idea! It’s always a bit tricky to store, becomes bitter when frozen (I always freeze pesto without it, and add it in when I thaw the pesto back out), but going weeks, let alone months without garlic just isn’t right. Nice tip on the peppers too, not sure I would have thought to slit them.
We finally broke down and bought some, but it was hard to find any that came from the US, and impossible to find any that was local – at least in April and May in southern Indiana. But by the end of May we had our own scapes, which helped. I’m going to plant some of the smaller cloves for green garlic next year also.
Waiting is definitely the hardest part. I didn’t know you can pickle garlic. That’s awesome!
so when you pickle them does that change the flavor?
I’m curious about this too. Can the pickled garlic be used in any dishes you’d normally put it in?
I don’t know for sure, since I’ve never pickled it before! Lynn’s first post about garlic said it could be used “with very little pickle taste”. My thought was, we use garlic in salad dressing which has vinegar in it, so at the very least it could be used for that. I also use garlic in stir fries, where any vinegar taste wouldn’t likely be noticed.
Pickled garlic, I never heard of it. Does it taste more acidic that fresh garlic or does the flavor mellow with time? I’m trying to imagine it…
I like to freeze garlic to use in cooking. I have done it for years and have never found a difference in flavor from fresh garlic. I mean, after it’s been sauteed in olive oil. I have no idea how raw frozen garlic tastes.
Pickling seems like a different product altogether that can be fun to have around for a change, thanks for the idea.
I was shocked this year to find that my garlic survived all the way until this year’s garlic was picked. A few heads had gone bad, but most had made it.
Thank you for reminding me — it’s refrigerator pickle time! We’re such addicts of the little cukes, fresh from the garden or just barely cooled in the fridge, that I have yet to do anything much with them but munch.
I love the taste of pickled garlic. Crossing my fingers for your first batch to turn out perfectly. 🙂 Another thing to do with all that garlic bounty is make and freeze pesto sauce. Yum. Was it you, Villager, who taught me to pour the sauce into ice-cube trays before freezing, so that I could use individual cubes over the winter? So happy to have that technique in my arsenal now…
I’m hoping we like the taste of the pickled garlic too!
I have all the ingredients for pesto, now I just need to find the time and energy! I do freeze mine in ice cube trays, and it is nice to be able to toss a cube into soup or sauce as needed.
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