Instructions

1. Pick heads that feel solid and show no green shoot at the neck. A sprouting clove has already spent its sugar and dries to something bitter.
2. Loosen the skins by pressing each clove under the flat of a knife instead of peeling by hand. Garlic skin sticks to wet fingers and takes an hour off your life.
3. Cut the woody base off every clove. It never softens, and in powder it shows up as gritty flecks that will not grind.
4. Slice the cloves lengthways to 2 mm. Cut this fine they dry evenly; chopped roughly, the small pieces are dust before the large ones are done.
5. Spread them on non-stick mats in one layer with nothing touching. Garlic weeps a sticky juice as it warms and touching slices fuse into a lump.
6. Run the machine somewhere other than the kitchen if you can. Drying garlic scents a whole house for a day, and it gets into anything else sharing the trays with it.
7. Dry at 60 °C for 9 hours. A slice is ready when it breaks with a sharp snap and has gone ivory rather than staying cream — any flexibility means it is still wet in the middle.
8. Let them go fully cold before deciding. Garlic is the worst offender in the machine for feeling crisp on the tray and turning leathery on the bench half an hour later.
9. Keep the slices whole in a sealed jar for a year and grind only what you need. Garlic powder cakes solid within weeks of being made, while the slices hold their snap and their smell far longer.