Black garlic is a very recent arrival on the superfood scene, and it’s interesting to note that while English-language Wikipedia credits someone from Korea with its invention in 2004, Japanese-language Wikipedia has a slightly more credible and detailed account describing the location and year as Mie Prefecture, Japan in 1999.
It is basically garlic that has been heated very slowly so that it ferments, and while the skin turns a slightly baked shade of brown, the cloves inside go completely black. This is, of course, visually surprising, but the taste itself is phenomenal: sweet, slightly fruity, and with hardly anything of the onion-like pungency that tends to be associated with garlic breath, garlic burps, and so on.
Having said that, the first time I had black garlic, I loved it so much that I ate a lot in a short space of time and not just my breath but my whole body apparently developed a kind of garlicky aura. One of Mrs M’s aunties had made the black garlic herself, in a laborious process that involves ten days to two weeks in a rice cooker on the ‘keep warm’ setting – in other words, very slow cooking at a very low temperature. There’s a good recipe in Japanese here, although you need to be careful: if the garlic isn’t properly fermented, it can give you a stomachache and diarrhoea. What’s more, your house will smell of garlic while it’s cooking and your rice cooker will smell of garlic for a long time afterwards.
The black garlic in the photographs here was purchased at that wholesale emporium of interesting foodstuffs, Gyōmu Sūpā. Given how difficult it is to make, black garlic tends to be expensive wherever you buy it, and I spotted some this week in a farm shop in Tsukuba that was 300 yen for one bulb. The Gyōmu Sūpā version is pricey, too, but uses a variety of garlic that I’ve never seen before, in which, rather than being divided into individual cloves, the bulb consists of just a single one. This variety apparently grows at altitude and has umami, sweetness, and a milder aroma that also make it ideal for fermenting to a delectable blackness. If you happen to be in Gyōmu Sūpā, I urge you to cast aside your garlicky prejudices and give it a try.
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