A Summer Pickle With Sweet-Sour Crunch

In the early summer—when garlic first comes into season—my mother used to go out of her way to buy fresh, imported garlic heads from a small Chinese grocer, just to make sweet pickled garlic (tángcù suàn, 糖醋蒜). Pickling garlic in a sweet-and-sour black vinegar-sugar brine is a popular way to enjoy the harvest in China. Unlike raw garlic, tangcu garlic can be enjoyed on its own, by the clove, and is served on small pickle plates as a side, like other paocai. The pickling process removes the garlic’s harsh, pungent spiciness and turns it sweet and mellow. Its bright, crisp, refreshing tang is the definition of 爽口 (shuǎngkǒu), a Chinese expression for anything refreshing and, often, thirst-quenching—think cucumber salad, watermelon, liangfen. 

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), garlic is a natural antibiotic that supports healthy digestion, detoxifies the body, kills parasites, reduces nausea and relieves damp cold and flu symptoms. By eating pickled garlic, you can achieve some of these health benefits without the usual rank breath. 

The traditional way to pickle heads of garlic is by peeling the outermost skin layers, removing the root and head, and then brining them whole. They look beautiful this way, like floating bronze crowns. To eat them, you dismantle the heads and eat them clove by clove. First you suck out all the delicious flavor that has soaked into the thin skin. Then, when the skin has offered up all its juices, you peel the clove and crunch the sweet garlic. 

Of course, pickling whole bulbs can be inefficient for space reasons. It can also be hard to remove a whole bulb from a narrow jar opening. So, in this recipe, I modified the traditional method to use just the cloves, separated from the bulb. If you don’t want to commit to pickling multiple bulbs of garlic, you can try this process out with only as many cloves as you like.

Choosing the Best Garlic to Pickle

My mother used fresh garlic bulbs imported from China because the softer, thinner skins absorb brine more easily and taste less pungent. However, conventional supermarkets in Western countries don’t typically carry true fresh garlic. The “fresh” garlic we get in the U.S.—even the organic stuff at a fancy pants grocer—is still cured for long-term storage. You’ll notice the bulbs have dry, flaky skins and brittle roots. I wanted to make sure folks outside of mainland China could enjoy this recipe, so I’ve adapted it for the cured stuff. 

When selecting garlic for pickling, look for smaller whole bulbs with thick layers of skin, without noticeably separated cloves or flaking layers. The skin should be tight and firm, white with no discoloration. It should not smell. The younger the garlic, the more compact the cloves and softer the skin. You’ll notice that more mature garlic has more grooves between the cloves. Some people actually prefer more mature garlic, specifically for the extra crispness. You can even use a mix of the two types, if you like. The quality of the garlic is more important than its age. White garlic is also milder than the purple garlic I’ve used in my photos here. If you want the most mellow flavor, choose white garlic (my preference after trying both).

For pickled garlic, bigger cloves are not necessarily better. The flavor of the finished pickle is going to be more concentrated if it doesn’t have as thick of a bulb to work through. Also, the best part of eating tangcu suan is sucking the brine from the garlic’s skin. If you’re using huge bulbs with giant cloves, you’ll have less skin and flavor to enjoy per piece.

Tips for Pickling Garlic

The steps for making sweet-sour pickled garlic are very straightforward, but the technique is important. The two most important tips are don’t get water on anything and don’t get oil on anything. Either will ruin your pickles.

The first step of the pickling process is to soak the garlic bulbs in a saltwater solution. This removes spiciness and bitterness. It also softens the skins, which helps the salt penetrate the garlic, increasing the finished flavor of the pickles and preventing the garlic from going bad. It doesn’t really matter what kind of salt you use for this. My mom uses table salt at home, but I happened to have kosher salt when I wrote this recipe, so that’s what I’ve included in the instructions. The key is to taste the brine; it shouldn’t be as salty as seawater, just a little salty. A little more or less will not make too big of a difference.

After you soak the bulbs for two nights, you need to let them air-dry thoroughly, to keep unwanted moisture from spoiling your brine. Bulbs are best dried on a rack, upside down (with the root end up) to allow the water to drain from any crevices. Individual cloves are, unsurprisingly, much easier to dry.

Lastly, you put the dried bulbs or cloves in a pickle jar with a black vinegar-and-sugar syrup and let them sit in a cool, dark place until they’ve absorbed the syrup’s flavor. (I’ve used granulated sugar here, but any kind of sugar will do; just taste the syrup and adjust the sweetness to suit your preference.) Conventional garlic (anything you or your grocer didn’t dig up from the ground recently) will need to pickle in the brine for about four weeks to develop a good flavor. If you grow your own garlic and have fresh, soft garlic to pickle, it can be ready in closer to two weeks. 

Stored properly, you can keep the tangcu suan for a year.

Using Up the Leftover Pickling Syrup

A bonus byproduct of the pickling brine my Sichuan family uses is the black vinegar syrup, which also has other uses. Once you’ve eaten enough of the pickled garlic to have extra liquid at the top of the jar, you can use this syrup in Sichuan liangban dressings so you no longer need to combine black vinegar, sugar and suanshui (minced garlic soaked in water). You can also reuse the extra brine to quick-pickle cucumbers: Salt the cucumbers to draw out moisture, then pickle them for 30–60 minutes.

My family likes to use roughly three parts vinegar to one part sugar when making tangcu suan, but many recipes use a three-to-two ratio or higher, to double the sweetness. The sweeter the brine, the more syrupy it gets later. This is a matter of personal preference. My recipe reflects my family’s preferences, but you can add more sugar, if you’d like.

For more homemade pickle recipes, check out our deep dive into Making Chinese Fermented Foods, which includes a thorough explanation of how to make Paocai as well as recipes for Sichuan Pickled Peppers (Paojiao), Yunnan-Style Pickled Mustard Greens (Suancai) and Salted Duck Eggs.