Black garlic.
Almost sounds like the villain in a spaghetti Western, doesn't it? Well, the unusual garlic is all good guy when paired with actual pasta. After a recent wire story reported the quirky ingredient was turning up on restaurant menus as a trendy new accent, we had to get our taste buds on some.
AJ's Fine Foods, at 2805 E. Skyline Drive, carries the stuff (a package of two garlic heads costs $6). The friendly produce guy found it tossed into a basket with other garlic varieties. He poked at the cellophane bag, and said: "I don't know anything about this. I don't even know if it's still good."
The garlic did look like something you'd make someone eat on a dare — a few oozy black cloves poked through the dark-brown, papery outer casing.
"You're on your own," Mr. Produce said.
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We assured him that's how the stuff is supposed to look.
Black garlic is fermented for about a month, giving it that peculiar appearance. But as is true of many of the world's tastiest foods, even though it looks nasty, it tastes great.
The fermentation process mellows the flavor and turns it into Super Garlic. The cloves are squooshy and sticky, and they looked like dried figs. The flavor is a shock at first — the first wave is one of sweetness, not cloyingly sweet but a subtle, natural taste like honey or molasses. The sharp bite that uncooked garlic normally has is muted in this variation.
The best part: When you eat black garlic — and we consumed copious amounts in the name of good food journalism — you don't suffer from that, ahem, garlic backlash. You know what we're talking about. More importantly, your significant other knows what we're talking about.
To really let the lovely sweet-and-savory taste shine, we tried simple preparations — bow ties bathed in an olive-oil-butter sauce that had simmered with chopped black garlic in it for about 10 minutes. An entire head didn't seem like too much. Cooking seems to bring out the sweetness even more.
Softened butter (1 1/4 sticks) combined with a head of chopped garlic made a heavenly spread for crusty sourdough.