How To Make Minced Garlic at Home {Video}

A step-by-step photo and video guide to show you how to make minced garlic at home, which can save you so much time and hassle while cooking. It’s a trick often used in restaurants. 

How many times did you come across a recipe that calls for minced garlic?

Unlike green onions, ginger or other herbs that you can just rinse and chop up when needed, garlic requires a certain amount of work to prepare before using. Minced garlic, one of the most commonly used ingredients in either restaurants or home cooking, appears very often in recipes.

What do you do when you need minced garlic for cooking?

Do you manually pick off some garlic cloves from the bulk; try to carefully peel off the skin until you lose your patience; spend a good couple minutes finely chop them? By the time the actual cooking starts, 10 minutes have gone by and you feel you’ve done so much work already.

Or, maybe you have a handy garlic press in your kitchen.

Or, you purchase bottled minced garlic directly from the grocery store to avoid all that hassle and save time.

We are absolutely on your side when it comes to saving that precious time and being able to just scoop up some minced garlic whenever we need so that we can start cooking right away. Having pre-prepared minced garlic at all times in the kitchen has been one of the essentials of our daily cooking. However, we prefer to crush a fresh garlic bulk from the farmer’s market and mince it at home, not just for cooking one dish, but for making multiple meals in the next couple of weeks.

This trick was taught by a restaurant owner in San Francisco. We have been applying it to our home cooking ever since then and it makes our lives so much easier. The secret of making chopped garlic last longer is to soak it in olive oil. It prevents the garlic from turning green and preserves the freshness.

With the right tool, making homemade minced garlic that lasts for weeks is actually trivial. Here’s a step-by-step instruction to show you how to mince garlic and store it. Hope you find it helpful.

Part One: Remove Garlic Skin

1. Break off the cloves from a garlic head.

2. Cut off the ends of each clove.

3. Place the flat side of a clove against your cutting board.

4. Use your chef’s knife with one hand holding the knife handle; place either flat side of your knife against the garlic clove; make sure that the sharp side of the blade is facing away from you and the garlic clove is closer to the handle of the knife.

5. Press down on the side of the knife blade against the garlic clove strongly with the palm of your free hand. Or just give it a punch if you have small hands.

6. At this point, the garlic clove is a little smashed and the skin is pretty much completely detached from the garlic.

7. Easily remove the skin with your hands. The skin should come right off.

8. Do the same with the rest of the garlic cloves.

Part Two: Mince Garlic And Preserve

9. If you have an electric chopper, now is the perfect time to use it. A good blender/food processor like Ninja will work as well. Otherwise, mince garlic using a chef’s knife.

10. Place chopped garlic in a small bowl or a small container with a lid; slowly pour extra virgin olive oil into the bowl until the garlic is completely covered by the oil. The amount of oil you use depends on the size of your garlic. Give it a gentle stir.

11. Now cover it with a plastic wrapper or a lid and keep refrigerated. The homemade minced garlic can be stored in the fridge for at least two weeks. To use, take it out from the fridge and scoop up the desired amount (1 teaspoon minced garlic approximately equals to 1 medium clove of garlic) with a clean spoon and store the rest of the garlic back in the fridge until next time.

Please note that you want to keep the garlic with oil in the fridge at all times when not using it. We usually prepare one bulk of garlic at a time and use it all before making another batch. How long does one batch last for us? Usually one to two weeks. If you find your homemade minced garlic has been sitting in your fridge for over two weeks, we suggest you toss it.

Here you have it. This is exactly how we make homemade minced garlic to keep in the kitchen at all times. Now, you can do it too. Hope you find this trick useful. Once you get a chance to try it, leave a comment below and let us know how you like it. Happy cooking!