Homemade Garlic Salt

For consecutive weekends, the boy has spent half his time kayak fishing. What this means is that, if we're lucky, once a week we have fish for dinner. Fish smells like, well, fish, so the best way to prepare it without being reminded that we had fish for dinner days later is to grill it outside. Especially since we're eating different fishes and want to compare their tastes, we're marinating them the same way with shake of salt, a grind of black pepper, a drizzle of olive oil, a mince of garlic, and a squeeze of lemon. So far, we've had striped bass, rock cod, halibut, and skate (listed in order of my preference) prepared this way.

The boy has been asking me to pick up garlic salt from the store for ages because sometimes the fresh garlic burns on the grill, and I've hesitated because it seems stupid to buy something that I knew had to be easy to make, especially with our dehydrator. So, when we found ourselves in Martinez as the farmers' market was closing, we struck a deal with a garlic vendor and got 3 pounds of garlic for $3. Score! Now, it was time to figure out how to make garlic salt.

The hardest part is peeling the garlic, which is to say, making garlic salt is not hard. Once the garlic cloves are peeled and washed, it was quick work to chop it up and spread it out on a dehydrator rack. I put the temperature to 125 °F, the vegetable setting, for 8 hours.

It will smell like Gilroy in your house for the first few hours, so you and your roomies will be safe from vampires.

Once the garlic is dehydrated, let it cool to room temperature, and then pulse it in a blender 4 or times times and assess the volume - my blender has graduated markings on the side, so I saw that I had about 1 cup of garlic. I added 1 cup of flakey sea salt to the blender. If you want your garlic salt less garlicky. add more salt. Continue pulsing the blender until the garlic salt is as course as cornmeal. That's it! Now you have homemade garlic salt. For the quantity I processed, I ended up with about 1.5 cups of garlic salt.