Wild garlic powder is a new preservation method of one of my favourite foraged plants. The wild garlic is ready for harvesting in some of my local haunts. In other places it is just peeping through, including at the bottom of my garden. If you are interested in picking some wild garlic I have already written some posts about what it looks like, how to find it, and what to do with it. I will attach the links at the bottom of this blog.
This year I intend to try some new recipes, and preserve it in different ways. Making sure that we have enough nutrition is really important when surviving on a low food budget, as we do. A lot of cheap foods that fill us up are carbohydrates, and bland. I am therefore going to dehydrate a wild garlic powder to add flavour, and a general green powder to add nutrition. My green powder will include wild garlic, but it will also have nettles, and leaves from harvested vegetables like Swiss chard, carrots and beetroot. If we have too much of things like spinach or pak choy for our meals, I hope to also add those. We will freeze some, but many people throw these and the tops of things in the compost or the bin. I am on a mission to have no waste.
We have been having some lovely sunny days recently and so I have been part drying the wild garlic naturally in my conservatory, and finishing it off in a dehydrator. I was lucky enough to get one for Christmas. Wild garlic can also be dehydrated in an oven on low (50C). It takes a lot of leaves to just make a little bit of powder, and so the more that you can dry naturally, the cheaper it will be. I also dehydrate things as the oven is cooling after baking to save money.
You might wonder how I will use my wild garlic powder. I will use it to flavour savoury bread, add it to soups, stews, wraps, quiches, eggs, flat bread, and other dishes in the winter to add flavour. I can not grow enough onions or garlic in the space that I have in our garden to meet our needs, and so this is a way of cutting back on buying any in the spring before mine are ready. If you read my blogs often you will know that I am trying to use a supermarket as little as possible. I don’t like the way that the big corporations are controlling and changing the food that we eat, or making it harder for farmers to make a living.
To make the wild garlic powder, all you need to do is pick the leaves. (The flowers can be pickled if you pick some by mistake). The stalks I save and chop up and add to salad. I keep them in a jam jar in the fridge. It is similar to adding spring onions. but free. I wash everything and soak in bicarbonate of soda before use to make sure that they are clean. This is to reduce the dirt, pollution, or contamination from rainwater or wildlife. I then rinse in warm water, checking them individually to make sure that no Lords and Ladies have been picked by mistake. (These are a poisonous plant that often grows in the same area as wild garlic, but is a different shape).
Afterwards, I dry them between two tea towels before putting into racks on my dining room table in the sun, or putting in to the oven or dehydrator. Don’t over lap the leaves. I never put the temperature above 50C as I do not want burnt leaves. The leaves are crispy when they are dehydrated enough to powder. I then grind them in our coffee grinder, but a pestle and mortar, or food processor will also work. My powders are stored in recycled jam jars and labelled.
As an experiment, the next time I dry some I am going to try whizzing it in my food processor before I dry it and then spreading it out thinly on silicone or parchment paper to see if it dries any more quickly (like a leather). It might go bendy and not crumble, as leathers do. We shall see. Every day is a school day, and a time to experiment and learn through our mistakes! Last year I made wild garlic salt for the first time, and we have used it almost every day since.
The photograph below shows how much powder I got from 6 trays in my dehydrator (it is not a big one), and so you can see it might not be worth the cost of energy if you are dehydrating a lot. I intend to dehydrate mainly on sunny days, or when my oven or air fryer is cooling down (free heat). I will also dry them elevated on my wood burning stove when I have it on.
Do any of you make green powders, and if so, how do you use them?
Other blogs about wild garlic that you might like
cheese and wild garlic scones with a kick
