Daniel and I love garlic and use it in many of our recipes.  Usually we prefer to use fresh garlic, crushed in a garlic press.  Every once in a while, though, we’ll run out of garlic or find that our last few cloves have gotten squishy–and also, there are a few recipes like Honey Baked Lentils that call for garlic powder and actually turn out better with it than crushed garlic–so we’ve always kept garlic powder in our cupboard.

But a few months ago, Daniel discovered a better alternative!

He was at our local food co-op buying some ingredients for cooking on a camping trip with his friend, and in the bulk section he noticed granulated garlic.  This is dried garlic ground into larger particles than garlic powder.  We’d always been annoyed by the all-natural garlic powder’s tendency to turn into a solid clump that has to be scraped and chipped before you can get any out of the bottle!  (Garlic powders that don’t do this have something added–either some kind of chemical or sand, yum.)  Daniel particularly wanted to avoid this effect while camping, because tools and work space would be less available, but he expected humid weather, which of course clumps up the garlic powder quickly.  So he bought the granulated garlic.

It’s great!  It works just like garlic powder in recipes, and the particles aren’t enough larger to be noticeable.  (The only place you couldn’t use it, I think, is in some kind of very fine-grained breading in which all ingredients are powders.)  It tastes at least as good as garlic powder, maybe even a little fuller and richer.  Best of all, in four months it hasn’t clumped up at all, despite humid weather.  I think we’ll be buying granulated garlic instead of garlic powder from now on!

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