Black Garlic

Last season on Top Chef, Hosea made a monkfish dish with black garlic. Always curious, I had to find some and use it. I figured it was some new variety of garlic, but it turned out to be regular garlic that has been fermented in a special process that not only turns it black, it gives it a sweet caramelized flavor and gooey texture.

I bought my black garlic online at saucenspice.com.

Two bulbs of very light weight garlic that looks like this out of the package:

See - I wasn't kidding - it's very black.

I decided to make something simple with it - black garlic olive oil to use on pasta. Since the garlic was kinda gooey, it was hard to mince. Above is three cloves in about 2 tablespoons of oil, and below is what it looked like on the pasta. (We had a leftover ear of yellow corn, so I chopped that up and tossed it in as well. I'm always trying to recapture the essence of perhaps the best pasta dish I have ever eaten, one made with squid ink pasta and corn, at Babbo. I always fail.)

One might think that three cloves of garlic would add a big hit of garlic flavor, but alas, it did not. The stuff is extremely mild.

Next time, 5 cloves.