Sunday, February 11, 2018

Black Garlic: Experiments and Delectable Failures

This post will eventually be about black garlic, the hot new culinary trend on the menus of fancy restaurants everywhere. But first: a sappy and quaint introduction!

The eggplant growing on my lanai has become a metaphor for my life here in Hawai'i and for my cooking exploits of late.

It started strong, cranking out blossoms and fruits right and left. Gradually the challenges of its new position wore it down so that it looked a bit threadbare. (Being eaten by spider mites is not unlike a prof after a busy teaching week, returning home at 10pm in a pencil skirt and collapsing onto the carpet, unable to make it to the couch. Then feebly sniffed at by a passing cat.) But the eggplant kept chugging and chugging, and still covered in spider mites, it put out new blossoms and branches and a fruit or two. I admire its persistence. If we all just find a way to emulate the eggplant, we'll be in great shape.

Leaves marbled by spider mites sucking all the juice from its veins. But flowers anyway. Good on ya.

My latest cooking experiment, like the eggplant on the lanai, combined failure + dogged determination.

It all starts with black garlic. My amazing mother, who really ought to be the one blogging, found a way to turn her homegrown garlic bulbs into homemade black garlic. It takes weeks in a rice cooker to ferment/caramelize. The result is Halloween-black, wrinkly, sticky, gooey, and delicious. It tastes like roasted garlic x10, a sort of onioney molasses. 


My mom is considering going into full production with this, so if you are a gourmet chef in the Seattle area who needs a local, organic, homemade and homegrown source of the highest quality black garlic: e-mail me and I will hook you up.


I really should leave it to the professionals. My attempt to make a gourmet black garlic eggplant dish was a delectable failure. I was going for a presentation that projected casual nonchalance, ingredients beautifully strewn across the platter, a sliver of lemon here, a smear of sauce there, a dash of herbs...

...and ended up with a tutti frutti nightmare of clashing colors like a dress from the 1980s that you cackle at in the thrift store.


Yes.

Would you like to see that up close?

Yes!
Would a different angle make it any better?

Oh wow.

Obviously I'm not proud of how this recipe looks... but it tasted pretty great.

On a serious note, here's what I learned about cooking with black garlic. It's actually much milder than you might expect. For all its dark richness in appearance, it's a muted flavor that needs to be paired with neutral ingredients like yogurt. I ended up making a black garlic tahini sauce with a squeeze of lemon, and while I found it delicious in many ways, even the flavor of the tahini overpowered the garlic a bit. Yogurt would be better. (I also messed up this sauce further by putting in a dash of pomegranate molasses, which was nice in theory but overpowered the whole thing.)

I also learned that black garlic is so sticky that it adheres to food processor blades. It should be crushed up into a paste with some water before grinding.

The other sauce is neon green and delicious a.f.

It's made from grinding up tons of fresh parsley, a dollop of yogurt, lemon juice, and salt.

Additional successes on this tutti frutti were: pine nuts coated in agave syrup and tossed in a pan until they become candied. Fried red jalapeƱo slivers. Perfect baby eggplants that we found at the Indian grocery, pictured here.



Coated in oil, smoked salt, and paprika. 

Roasted and ready to rumble.
There was a lot of potential packed into this odd assortment of things on a platter. Each component could go in an interesting, delicious direction in some other dish. So it's an experimental first start towards delectable things to come.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to experiment with black garlic and post the results next time. And shake off my spider mites and put out some more blossoms, etc. etc. < / quaintness >