How to braid garlic
Video Transcript
Hi, John from heirloom harvest here, just a quick video to show you how we braid our garlic. The first thing you need to do is to pick your garlic at the right stage. Generally speaking for garlic, you want to pick it when there's 4 to 5 green leaf still at the top of the plant. So, you can see here on this Sicilian white which I've just picked we have 1, 2, 3, 4 green leaves still, so that's about the perfect timing.
The next thing you need to do is to clean it up a bit. You can see its covered in a lot of dirt there's a lot of old dead leaves, that won't look very good in the braid. So, the easiest way to do that is to just grab some of these old leaves and just tear them back. Sometimes you'll find that they'll still be a bit of dirt left at the bottom here, you can spend a lot of effort trying to get that last bit of dirt off, I find it's much easier just to take another layer of leaf off like that, now you have a nice clean bulb.
So, the next stage is just to trim up the roots and make it nice to neat on the bottom and there you have it ready for braiding. Okay so once you've got your garlic all cleaned up, it’s time to start braiding. I find that much easier to do on a hard surface so I'm just going to move up to the table and we'll continue there.
Ok, so a big tip for getting the neatest looking braids is to start with your largest bulbs first and work your way through to your smallest. To start with you want to take two of your largest bulbs and place them in a cross just like this and then take a third and place it down in the centre like so. There's two different methods for securing these first three bulbs one is to take a piece of twine and tie it around like so. Alternatively, the more traditional method is to take stem from the bottom bulb and wrap it around the bottom bulb itself, around the centre bulb and back down through and out the side here.
Ok, so once you have those first three bulbs secured you want to continue laying bulbs and that same one-two-three pattern. Each time you lay a new bulb you want to bring the stem down in line with the stem or stems that are in the centre. So then once you've done that you then bring the opposite side over to the centre, you lay the next bulb, the opposite side over to the centre lay a centre bulb, then the opposite side over to the centre. Ok, then again on the starting side, then down to the centre and bring the opposite side over and into the centre. Lay another bulb the opposite side bring it down to the centre and then bring the opposite side over and into the centre, then another bowl in the centre and opposite side over and into the centre and back to the opposite side down the centre. The opposite side, down the centre and then once you've run out of garlic, we need to just continue the plat down the stems like this, until you run out of stems.
And there you have it a nice neat garlic braid. So, what we like to do next so take a piece of string secure it around the top like this to hold it all nice together and then tie another loop into the string so that you’ve got something to hang it from. There you go, so I hope this video has been useful have fun with your braiding.