UK: Black garlic – all the taste, with none of the bad breath

Black garlic has gone on sale promising cooks all the flavour of the normal, pungent flavouring but none of the associated bad breath. The ingredient, which has been used for a while in Thailand and Korea, became a craze with cooks in America last year and has gone on sale in Selfridges department store in London.

Top London chefs have already started experimenting with the novel flavouring. The product has the full – if less astringent – taste of garlic, but, crucially, anyone who eats the bulb does not suffer from the bad breath that usually comes with consuming garlic.

It is produced by fermenting a standard bulb in a high temperature for about a month. The result is that, from the outside, the garlic looks like a normal bulb, with papery skin. Once peeled, however, the flesh is revealed to be a inky, black colour with a slightly chewy texture.

In Asia it is used in number of dishes, particularly fish ones, as well as a flavouring in soft drinks where it is sometimes used as a substitute for tamarind.

Claude Bosi, the head chef of Hibiscus, the fashionable, Michelin-starred restaurant in Mayfair, London said: “I really like the texture and depth of flavour this has – without being as potent as regular garlic. I am using it in a new dish that is in progress at the moment: a veal sweetbread, studded with black garlic”.

The ingredient does not come cheap, however, costing £5.49 for two bulbs at Selfridges compared with about 50p for two bulbs of standard garlic at most supermarkets.

Source: telegraph.co.uk