Honey-fermented Garlic was our first venture into garlic fermentation.
We have always used garlic in most of our fermented vegetables, but fermented garlic on its own came to being in 2017.
To be precise, it was in February that we decided to make our first Honey Fermented Garlic.
Here's a vintage picture from that humble beginning.
It is a simple ferment in which garlic starts fermenting naturally in raw honey.
It is an interesting process. Normally, honey is very stable and it can stay unchanged for many, many years.
But when the moisture inside that honey is a bit too high, honey starts fermenting on its own.
Here, the fermentation gets activated when honey contributes to the release of raw garlic juices.
Those juices add the needed moisture that kicks off the fermentation process.
With time, garlic loses its bite and honey starts changing its color.
The longer that process lasts, the darker those two ingredients become.
The end result looks almost like as if the garlic was caramelized.
We kept the first batch that we made for five years.
Below, you can see how it looked exactly two years later, in February 2019.
Honey Fermented Garlic is a natural medicine and traditionally, it is used against common colds.
But it also has other health promoting properties, as a combination of two powerful raw ingredients.
There are many articles about this particular ferment. Here's one from Healthline.com
This is quite a popular ferment and many people make it at home, but usually they do not keep it that long. And it is really not necessary to keep it for years. We just wanted to see how it tastes and how it changes over time.
So in 2022, we finally opened it up for good.
So, here it is, yummy and coated with honey.
And in the retail jars.
That particular batch sold out quite fast, so we have decided to make another one.
To make it, you just need two ingredients. garlic and honey.
The trouble starts when you want to make a bigger batch, like for example 5 Liters of it.
That requires a lot of garlic and also a lot of peeling, which also takes a significant amount of time.
That is the reason why we do not make this ferment that often.
We were lucky to get this Spanish big clove garlic. It made it a bit easier to peel it.
For honey, we use a local, unfiltered raw honey that we also use to make our Jun Kombucha.
When it was all done and mixed, it looked like this.
And this.
Both garlic and honey were nicely mixed up.
Next, within few days starts a natural process of osmosis. In this process, the sugars from honey pull water out of garlic. As a result, there's a separation visible, in which garlic and the liquid stay on top, and the still unmixed honey stays on the bottom.
With time, all honey will mix up with garlic again.
Here's a picture taken a month later.
There's a visible color change, which will only intensify with the passing time and with warmer temperatures.
Two months later and our garlic is getting darker.
And six months later...
And almost 10 months later.
One year, and we had enough people asking about it, so we opened it up.
And within one week, half of it is already gone.
It takes a long time to get ready, but it always goes so fast. Here are the last jars of 2022 garlic.
In November 2022, we set up two jars instead of our traditional one.
So see you in about one year.
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And exactly one year later!
Ingredients: Garlic and Raw Honey