Torontonians are loving their first taste of a fermented and aged black garlic that has captivated American chefs and become a must-try item for adventurous cooks.
Mark McEwan read about rich and luscious black garlic in the spring and ordered some online from the United States to sell in his gourmet market, McEwan, when it launched in June. He has already sold 60 pounds.
Loblaw Co. is poised to add black garlic to the produce roster at some of its stores. Whole Foods marketing manager Jim Empey is also keen to offer it at its Yorkville and Oakville locations.
"People have really taken to it here," says McEwan's executive assistant Jordie McTavish. "Every bite has so much flavour."
She takes a jar of McEwan's cured field tomatoes packed in olive oil, stirs in mashed black garlic cloves, and "makes the most beautiful" spaghetti sauce. She also works black garlic into her avocado bruschetta.
"I don't know much about the product itself," McTavish admits. "We're just trying to figure out ways to use it."
Scott Kim, the Korean-born American owner of the Black Garlic Co., is an expert on the subject. "Ninety-nine per cent of the black garlic over the United States and Canada is our product," he reports.
His California-based company buys select bulbs of organic garlic from South Korea and California. They put them in a specially designed, patented fermenting machine and monitor the heat and humidity for three weeks until the cloves within the bulbs have properly blackened.
As he explains, garlic contains sugars and amino acids. When it's fermented, these elements produce melanoidin, a dark substance that turns the cloves black.
The bulbs are cooled and dried on racks for one week, before they're sorted and packaged by hand. On the outside, they look like dried brown heads of garlic. Peel the papery skin and you'll find the dense, chewy black cloves.
Black Garlic Co. launched in 2008, but Kim's team had been working on the product in Korea since 2004 and had been exporting it to the United States since 2005.
It wasn't until last year, when Kim got chefs to try his product, that things really took off.
Since black garlic started showing up on restaurant menus, Gourmet has lauded its "mellow, umami-rich flavour." (Umami is the term used to describe the fifth human taste, for meaty and savoury foods.)
Epicurious.com called black garlic "culinary gold." Iron Chef America and Top Chef New Yorkfeatured it on their shows.
Black Garlic Co. has turned to Frieda's, a specialty produce company also in California, to help popularize the product.
"It looks like it's really old and ugly and why would you ever buy it, so it really takes a marketing effort (to sell it)," admits Jackie Caplan Wiggins, Frieda's vice-president and business development manager. "Once people try it, it has just been so well received."
Frieda's started hyping black garlic to the media in April. It's now in talks with Loblaw Co. to bring black garlic to Canada.
One holdup is the need for French and English bilingual packaging in Canada. Black Garlic Co. mainly packs two bulbs in a sealed plastic bag with moisture absorber. Another option for Canadian stores is to buy the garlic in bulk and repackage it themselves.
While Caplan Wiggins is busy getting black garlic samples into mouths across North America, she often recommends spreading cream cheese on a small, plain cracker and topping it with a peeled black garlic clove (whole or sliced) as "a really nice hors d'oeuvre."
It's best to think of black garlic as an affordable treat. McEwan sells it for $77.16 per kilogram, which works out to about $6.80 for two bulbs. That's comparable to American prices.
Black garlic caught the ear of some of the members of the Ontario Farm Fresh Marketing Association, and executive director Cathy Bartolic also wants to know more.
In Ontario, only 160 to 200 hectares are planted with garlic these days, according to the Garlic Growers Association of Ontario, and most of it is sold at roadside stands, farmers markets, garlic festivals and a few independent grocers. In 2001, in contrast, we grew 1,600 hectares of garlic, but that was before our market was flooded with garlic from countries like China.
One has to wonder whether Canadian garlic growers could fight back by learning to create black garlic.
Kim says Black Garlic Co. has the exclusive patent on the fermenting machine, but is willing to partner with others who want the machine and the training.
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