garlic salt

in the united states it’s pretty common to buy little jars of garlic salt like you buy other dried herbs. but they don’t even compare to the homemade garlic salt that my grandmother always made. it is a bit a tiring to make it with her method, but luckily i discovered a *much* easier and quicker way to make it. i’ll explain both, but let’s start with old-fashioned way.

i’m using the word “method” and not “recipe” because my grandmother herself said that there isn’t any actual recipe because you have to figure out the quantities every time to get the right balance. i’ve found that for me i like using:

• 1/2 cup of salt (100 g)
• 3 cloves of garlic
• a few twists of a pepper mill

first you peel the garlic cloves and mince them as small as possible. then you put the salt on a cutting board and put the garlic and pepper on top.

then you crush it all over and over with a rolling pin. this is the part that takes both time and energy. my grandmother always had a separate rolling pin  especially for making garlic salt because it’s pretty much impossible to get the garlic stink out of it. i tried slipping an empty toilet paper roll over our rolling pin so the garlic wouldn’t come in contact with it, but it wouldn’t roll very well that way. then i wrapped the rolling pin in plastic wrap. the plastic tore so i had to replace it halfway through, but it worked. my grandmother also suggested opening up a large paper bag and placing it under the cutting board so that, as you crush the salt, it falls from the edges onto the paper and, after a while, you can easily dump it back onto the cutting board to keep working at it.

when it’s as homogeneous as possible, you can put it in a jar. my grandmother suggested keeping it in the fridge, but i don’t think that’s even necessary because in theory the salt should preserve the garlic quite well for at least 6 months.

but i know that none of you has much free time and probably not an extra rolling pin to dedicate to garlic salt production, either. but if you have a food processor, there’s a MUCH easier and faster way to do it. all you have to do it dump all the ingredients in the processor, process for a couple of minutes…

…and there you have it! ready to put in a jar and use!

how can you use it? a better question would be, how could you NOT use it?! in my family we’ve always used it mostly on salads and on meat (if you roast a thanksgiving turkey in the oven, this salt makes for a super tasty skin, even if i won’t be eating it anymore since becoming a vegetarian.). but now i’m discovering lots of ways to use it: on cooked veggies, on pasta, in sauces, in soups, in the mixture for bean burgers. with a tiny bit of imagination there’s no limit to the ways you can use it! buon appetito!