Making size - garlic juice

When I made the glair, I was attempt to make a period size; that is, a period glue for attaching gold leaf to parchment. Since that didn't go so well (which is going to be its own post), I decided to try another period size - garlic juice.

Initial set up was to dice up the garlic cloves and grind them in my mortar. I gave up after about 10 minutes of this, when it became clear that the garlic was more intent on escaping the mortar than obediently turning into mush. I think before I try this method again, I need to invest in an rougher mortar so the garlic has something to grip onto.



So I gave up and reached for *coff* ye olde stick blender. In mere dozens of seconds, garlic mush!

My first attemt to extract the juice from this was to try pushing it through a fine metal sieve. And while this did give me the first few drops of juice, very shortly afterwards a fine pulp starting coming through; not so great.

I remixed the fine pulp with the mixture in the sieve and this time tried sqeezing it by hand in a piece of muslin. Squeezing too hard here produced the same problem, but another quick reset, and this time I had liquid gold!

The tiny jar of the right is the product of two whole bulbs of garlic. I didn't press the pulp completely dry, as I intended to pop it into a jar and leave it in the fridge until my next stir fry. I do hope this size works. I shall be trying it out shortly!