by Jerri

Garlic is my absolute favorite food to ferment. I am lost without a jar full of fermented garlic in my fridge, and it’s a life/time-saver when cooking meals. There was a time I would even press cloves in the morning as part of my children’s daily supplement routine.

Now that it is fall in Oregon, it’s time to plant the garlic so that it can grow long roots over the winter and spring, and then be harvested in the summer. My garlic comes from Eastern Oregon from a wonderful farmer who specializes in garlic seed.

My sweet pup is here on squirrel watch while I plant the cloves: 

The chicken wire is meant to help keep critters, mainly those pesky squirrels and bigger birds, out of my garlic. My garlic actually started sprouting already, so in a panic I contacted my farmer, and then I had some help covering the patch with leaves as mulch to get me through the next 9 months: 

It’ll eventually look like this:

Then harvest and curing sometime in June/July:

It’s super easy to ferment…

1. Get those cloves out of their skins
2. Stuff them into the fermenting container
3. Create a brine of 1-3 Tablespoons of sea salt per quart of water
4. Pour the brine over your garlic, fully submerging them
5. Add weights to keep them down under the brine
6. Screw the lid on, preferably an airlock
7. Put in an area 65-70ºF, colder is ok
8. Ferment 3-7 days, my preference is 7!
9. Store in the fridge