Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
News to me.
At our local Italian deli, they’re selling black garlic.
From blackgarlic.com,
Imagine garlic without all of the annoying stuff. Bad breath? Nope. Pungent odor? Nope. Acrid bite? No sir. You know how a great wine gets better with age? That’s what we’re dealing with here.
Well, as Karen points out, cooking garlic accomplishes much the same thing. The Wikipedia entry provides a better explanation of the appeal: “It is made by fermenting whole bulbs of garlic at high temperature, a process that results in black cloves. The taste is sweet and syrupy with hints of balsamic or even tamarind.” The Wiki further explains that
black garlic entered the mainstream in 2008 when Le Sanctuaire in San Francisco began selling its own black garlic. It was written up in the Spring 2008 “Design and Living” special section of the New York Times as a “new staple” of modern cuisine (and incorporated into a recipe, “Black Garlic Roast Chicken”); the NYT author, Merrill Stubbs, noted it was being used by chef Bruce Hill of Bix Restaurant, San Francisco. Hill soon found his way to the entrepreneur Scott Kim, who in 2005 had started to import garlic from Jeju Island, Korea, to process in the United States. He ferments them for a month, at high temperature, and sells them online. Black garlic’s fame grew from there. Soon, Matthias Merges, executive chef at Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago, listed black garlic as one of his top five food finds in Restaurant News, December 2008. The rise of black garlic in the US was called “sensational,” and other trade publications besides Restaurant News have noticed the trend.
It garnered television attention when it was used in battle redfish on Iron Chef America, episode 11 of season 7 (on Food Network), and in an episode of Top Chef New York (on Bravo), where it was added to a sauce accompanying monkfish.
Sounds intriguing, especially the part about black garlic conferring immortality (or at least longevity) upon its consumer.
There can be only one!
D.
i dunno if it’s just me, but…that looks pretty gross to me, like it’s rotted. and i want my garlic to taste like garlic–not balsamic or tamarind. hm.
I’ve been waiting for the Next Fashionable Ingredient and maybe this is it. We’re about done with goat cheese. Time for it to go the way of balsamic vinager and sundried tomatoes.
Happy Halloween, ladies!
Nuns. No sense of humor.
*ahem*
Funny, I just stumbled across this stuff online over the weekend. My reaction was pretty much ‘eh.’ We’ll see after I taste it in something.
@shaina: it *is* rotted… carefully controlled rot, but rot the nonce.
@Dean: there was a funny article not that long ago in Cooking Light that described how new foods move from chefs through the various tiers of the food press and into the mainstream. Since most food magazines plan out and write their articles a year in advance, there’s a not insignificant risk that an ingredient will have crashed and burned by the time an article comes to press, or that the ingredient will be over-exposed. The worst thing that can happen as a food publication is to have an article featuring a particular ingredient hit the shelves right just as McDonald’s launches an ad campaign for a new food featuring the same ingredient.
Shaina: Where’s your sense of adventure?
Dean: But I like balsamic vinegar and sundried tomatoes! Especially sundried tomatoes. Balsamic vinegar ain’t bad but I could live without.
ps: I’d love to see the Big Black Garlic Mac! Just the thing to rally Mickey D’s flagging sales here in the States.
I like balsamic vinegar and sundried tomatoes, too, but there was a time when every goddam thing had sundried tomatoes on it, in it, or near it. Same with balsamic vinegar.
Right now that ingredient is goat cheese, and I don’t like goat cheese. It’s been goat cheese for a while now, and I’ve been wondering what was going to move up to replace it on the Swishy Food Menu. Maybe black garlic will be thing.
Shaina, rot isn’t a bad thing. We use controlled rot, and forms of rot, in many things. Cheese and wine, for example.
I saw an ad for it in my grocery store yesterday. Hmmm… guess it’s not the same thing if I find it in the bottom of my fridge, in the crisper behind a mostly deceased piece of zuchini? huh?
I’ll have to taste it to believe it!
Dean: we need to start a Swishy Food Network!
Rella: no, bottom of the fridge can’t be right. The website specifically notes this to be a HIGH temperature fermentation process.