Can You Store Fresh Garlic In The Freezer?

An ingredient essential to infinite recipes and so beloved by experts and amateurs alike that the urge to add more no matter what has become a universal yearning, garlic is a cooking staple. It's a must-have pantry item, right up there with your tomato purée, your dried herbs and spices, and your olive oil (look! — we've practically prepared a tomato sauce already!). But it's also one that will go bad before those shelf-stable goods even begin to collect dust. Plus, while it might not ruin dinner to realize you've run out of garlic, you'll miss its pungent punch nonetheless. Both are compelling reasons to try to prevent such unpleasantness.

Fortunately, you can freeze fresh garlic more successfully than some of its allium brethren. Daintier chives, for example, just don't seem to bounce back as nicely when frozen whole. Their higher water content (around 90%) means there's more liquid to solidify, expand, and basically break down the solids. Garlic's lower water content (around 65%) makes it less vulnerable to that deterioration.

While a whole garlic bulb will supposedly last for up to six months in that popular produce destination (a cool, dark place), especially if stemmed, we have yet to enjoy such longevity. Maybe your place is cooler and darker. If not, assess how much time you have for a food storage task and choose your own frozen garlic adventure. The allium should last for up to 12 months in the freezer.

If you only have 30 seconds, you can pop a garlic bulb right into a resealable plastic bag, or encase it in cling wrap. Freezing whole is more effective for a garlic bulb than something like, say, an apple, because it's comparatively tiny and naturally segmented, so it'll come up to temperature and break apart pretty easily when you're ready to thaw it. If you have five full minutes, you can peel your garlic cloves restaurant-style, arrange them on a parchment-lined baking sheet, and freeze for a few hours before transferring them to an airtight container to freeze long-term. That middle step isn't even strictly necessary, but the pre-freeze can help keep the cloves from sticking together over time. And if you have 10 minutes, peel, mince, portion into ice cube trays, barely saturate with water, cover, and, you know the drill: freeze. The time it takes to get that garlic fragrance off your hands will vary, of course.