Ingredients · Spice

Garlic

Allium sativum · Amaryllidaceae (amaryllis family)

Garlic
A bulb, dried and broken down to three different coarsenesses, and the single most common ingredient in this catalogue — forty-three products carry it. Granulated is coarse and blooms slowly in hot oil; minced is visible pieces that plump up in a sauce; powder disappears into a rub, a dressing or a compound butter. Drying takes away the raw bite and leaves something sweeter and toastier than a fresh clove, which is why dried garlic is not a substitute for fresh so much as a different ingredient with its own job.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partBulb
KindSpice
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromCentral Asia (native range)
TasteSweet, toasty and savoury; deeper and rounder than fresh garlic, without the raw bite

How to use it

Granulated into rubs and long-cooked sauces, where it has time to soften. Minced where you want to see it — chili, marinades, roast potatoes. Powder into dressings, dips, compound butter, garlic bread and anything that has to stay smooth. A guide from McCormick, for its own products: one medium clove finely minced for each eighth of a teaspoon of garlic powder; for dried minced garlic, crush it and use an equal measure. Dried garlic burns fast — add it to the fat off the heat, or to the liquid.

With food

Tomato, olive oil and bread. Butter and parsley. Beef, lamb, chicken and pork. Potatoes in every form. Mushrooms. Lemon and anchovy. Yogurt and cucumber. Chile of any kind.

With spices

Onion, its sister bulb, in almost everything. Oregano and basil for Italian. Paprika and cumin for Spanish and Mexican. Black pepper and thyme for a roast. Ginger and chile for stir-fries.

With tea

Not a tea ingredient. If you are drinking something with a garlicky meal, a strong Assam or a smoky Lapsang Souchong stands up to it.

Its story

Where it comes from

Kew gives the native range as Central Asia to northeastern Iran — Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The University of Wisconsin Extension calls the foothills of those ranges probably the true birthplace of garlic. Most of the world's dried garlic today comes from China, which grew 73% of the crop in 2024, or from California, where Gilroy has dehydrated garlic since the late 1930s. Which of those our lots come from is not something we can confirm without the supplier's record.

What happened

Garlic has been cultivated in Mesopotamia for at least four thousand years and was sealed into Tutankhamun's tomb around 1325 BC. Herodotus stood at the Great Pyramid and heard an interpreter read out the money spent on vegetables for the workmen. Numbers 11:5 is homesickness in one verse: in the desert, the Israelites remember the garlic of Egypt. Greek and Roman soldiers, sailors and country people ate it, and the Mishnah's nickname for Jews was "garlic eaters". In Korea's founding myth a bear is given twenty cloves of garlic and a bundle of mugwort and told to stay out of the sunlight for a hundred days; she does, becomes a woman, and bears Dangun. Central European folk belief hung it in windows against demons, werewolves and vampires. The dried kind is a twentieth-century story: a chili-powder company in Los Angeles took up dehydration in the Depression, built a plant at Gilroy, California, and dried food for the military through the war.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

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