Peeling Garlic the Easy Way

Here is a sample of our garlic harvest.  This wasn't all, either.

This year, my goal was to separate each bulb into cloves, then peel each clove, then freeze all the peeled cloves in a freezer container.  I've frozen garlic before, since you can use it straight from the freezer into your garlic press.  It gets soft very quickly after you take it out of the freezer, but it's an excellent way to make sure a large harvest of garlic does not go to waste.  But--how do you get such a time-consuming chore done quickly?  Here's what I did:

I set a bulb on the table, then smashed into it with the palm of my hand.  I don't smash terribly hard, mind you--I don't want garlic mush, just separated cloves.  The "punch" of my palm into the head of garlic works well.  I then put all of the separated cloves into a bowl.

Some of the cloves came right out of their skins, so I set them aside in a separate bowl.

Okay, all the cloves were separated and put into a stainless steel bowl.  I took another stainless steel bowl--the same size bowl would be ideal; mine is smaller and "nests" inside the bigger one--and placed it over the top of the bowl with the cloves.

Then I got one of my guys to shake-shake-shake the bowls (while holding them together!) for a minute or so.

When the bowls were opened, the garlic cloves were peeled!  In my case, since I had sooo much garlic, about one-third of the cloves were peeled.  We picked them out, then shook the bowls again.

Danny did the honors the second time.

We had to do the shaking part three or four times, but most of the cloves were peeled.  It was simply a matter of picking them out and transferring them to another bowl.  Here they are at the end of the process:

Yes, it was time-consuming after the above steps--I had to cut off the stem end of each clove.  After that step, I rinsed them all very well, then towel-dried them and placed them in a freezer container.  But it was so worth it, and I have a large container full of yummy home-grown garlic to use throughout the winter!


Back to life,
Christine

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