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It’s easy to freeze garlic for later use in your favorite recipes. Freeze garlic in bulk with these tips and save time in the kitchen!
Congratulations! You’ve successfully planted your garlic crop and had a bountiful harvest. (Or maybe you just went to Costco and bought a giant 5-pound bag of garlic.)
Now you have more garlic than you know what to do with, but you want to use it before it begins to sprout.
Good news! It’s easy to preserve fresh garlic by freezing it. Then you can use it in stir-fry, soups, Instant Pot recipes–just about anything you can think of. Let’s get started.
How to Freeze Garlic
Ingredients and tools:
Garlic
Olive oil
Choppermajigger (I use this one), optional
Large mason jar for peeling, optional
Instructions:
Step 1. Peel massive amounts of garlic. The fastest way to do this is to separate the cloves and place them into a large mason jar. Put on the lid and shake, shake, shake. Warning: this will cause your husband and children to dissolve into hysterical laughter–but it really works!
Step 2. Put peeled cloves into your choppermajigger (Small Helper Child optional) and pulse until garlic is the desired texture. I left mine at a fine dice, since you can always make it smaller but ya can’t make it bigger.
Step 3. Scoop the garlic into a bowl, add olive oil, and stir gently. Use a little less than 2 tablespoons of oil for each cup of chopped garlic. More oil is not better, as we’ll see in Step 4.
Step 4. Using a tablespoon or regular spoon, plop scoops of garlic onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper or a Silpat. You can see that the first scoops are better formed and the ones at the end look pretty sloppy. This is because there’s too much olive oil left in the bowl and the garlic doesn’t keep its shape as well.
Step 5. Put the cookie sheet in the freezer. Send Hubby to the freezer for ice cream and see what he says when he finds the garlic. Just kidding about that part. 😉
Step 6. After a few hours, your garlic will be frozen into tidy little pucks. Place them in a zip bag and store in the freezer. A 1-Tablespoon scoop is roughly equivalent to 3 cloves of garlic.
Step 7. Optional, based on the continued presence of Small Helper Child: get all the pieces of garlic “paper” off the counter, floor, clothes, face, and hair of said child. Thank her for helping, and send her on her way.
After choppamajiggering the garlic cloves and mixing with olive oil, I press the mix into ice cube trays and freeze. I have the ice cube trays with lids so I just pop a cube out when I need it, but you can totally transfer the cubes to a zip bag if you want. My trays make standard size ice cubes and I estimate about 3 cloves per cube as well. I can usually cut into the size needed, but it is a little tough. Next time, I may fill only 1/2 way for easier portioning when frozen.
Can u just freeze individual cloves and then put in storage bags?
Great description of how to freeze garlic
Absolutely love the humour
frozen onions from now on !!
What a great suggestion. I will remember for next time. This time I used oil but like you I am trying to get away f rom to much oil. Anxious to see how this turns out.
We are talking “Olive Oil”. There is nothing more healthy for your body than Olive Oil!!
I buy a years worth of garlic as soon as that years fresh crop shows up in the markets, using a silicone tube, roll the papers off, place them in tall skinny bottles with a sealing lid and place one jar in the kitchen freezer and the rest in the big freezer. This way my garlic is always in prime condition. I am also going to freeze couple of whole heads this year.
That’s a great tip! Then you can easily break off a small amount if that’s all you need.
I do something similar….I mince the garlic in the food processor. Then I spread it in a 9X13 inch pan that I have lined with parchment paper (with tails hanging over the two ends of the pan). It probably ends up being about 1/3 inch thick. If I have too much, I just use a second pan. I do not add any oil. Put the pans in the freezer. After a few hours, pull the garlic out of the freezer and then out of the pan and slice it into rectangles that are about 1 inch by 2 inches. Put the rectangles in a gallon freezer bag. The rectangles end up being thin enough that if I want a smaller piece I can actually break a rectangle in half with my fingers. This keeps really well with very little change in flavor. The only time I have trouble with the garlic odor is while they are in the pans. I try to get it into a freezer bag as soon as it is frozen, and then the smell disappears. Just don’t forget you’ve put the garlic in the freezer!!
Is it possible to do this without the oil or by substituting it for something? I’m working on going oil-free for the family. Thanks in advance for any advice you might have on this.
I do this same thing with Basil as well….. but instead of round mounds, I tightly pack Ice cube trays….. wait a few hours and then have nice Basil or Garlic “bricks” that I then store in a freezer bag. Lasts at least a year!
Does the garlic lose any strength through the freezing process?
Does this leave a garlic smell in the freezer?
Norwex had a fridge/freezer freshener, lasts a couple years and I’ve had no garlic smell problem
Where is the best place to buy garlic for planting?
We’ve also discovered that if you roast a head of garlic you can just throw it as-is in the freezer and it’s pretty easy to squeeze out of the skins/peel as needed.
I dried garlic last season and its just lasted us through to the next garlic season. It is about the same amount of work as your freezing method, and took a couple of days in he dehydrator. Then I just kept it in a jar and used up the fresh garlic first, then into the dried granules, its been really convinient. I like your mason jar method, peeling the garlic is the worst part!