A couple of weeks ago when I made garlic salt I said that I might make up a jar, with some pepper in it, to take on vacation. Well, it’s coming up, so I did grill seasoning.
Ingredients
2 cloves of garlic
1 teaspoon peppercorns
kosher salt (see below for the amount)
Directions
Peel the garlic, cut the bottom of the stem off, and split each clove in half.
If they have started to sprout, you haven’t been making enough Italian food. No wait … what I meant to say was if they have started to sprout you need to remove the sprout. Pop it out with your thumb, it comes out easy.
Then chop them lengthwise, then mince it.
Set the garlic aside and crack the pepper.
Same trick as last time, with the foil and the side of the meat mallet. (And if you’ve got a really sharp eye, you’ll notice that’s the same piece of foil. Yes, I’m that cheap that I kept it.)
Don’t worry that it’s really uniform. We’ll take care of that in the next step.
Mortar and pestle time.
Start with just the garlic and pepper.
Don’t pound with the mortar. Grind the ingredients slowly into a paste.
Add a tablespoon of salt and grind again.
If it’s still a paste — it depends on how large your garlic cloves were — add another tablespoon of salt.
Keep adding salt a tablespoon at a time until it’s no longer a paste, but starts getting crumbly. As you grind the salt, it will absorb the oils from the garlic and pepper.
You’ve added enough salt when it’s loose enough to dispense from a salt shaker.
You could use a salt shaker, but I made this to take on vacation. So I kept and cleaned one of the little spice jars that I happened to use the last from just in time. Sometimes you get lucky, and you made exactly enough to fill the container you’ve got available.
Air-tight, snap-top lid with a built-in shaker. Perfect for vacation.
And that’s it.
