To give you a brief sum up, garlic bulbs are slowly fermented by continuous heating in a low oven for 40 days. When the garlic comes out, the individual cloves are black and almost fudge like in texture.
The taste is supposed to be delicious, more mellow, sweeter and almost Marmite like without the garlic after taste so it is very versatile.
Black Garlic has all the health benefits of regular garlic and nearly twice the antioxidants and is good for lowering blood pressure and cholesterol.
It seems you can buy it at some of the larger Tesco shops and online but it is quite expensive due to the process.
This got me thinking as I wanted some, could you make your own? For anyone with a properly functioning oven this would be quite an expensive and possibly inconvenient experiment to commit to for 40 days.
However, as some of my friends will know, I have to cook on 'the Aga from hell!' This house has such a manky old Aga (no alternative cooking facility other than my camping stove) which is a solid fuel to oil conversion and it never reaches anywhere near the right temperature, even after a service. As I always say, good job I don't eat animals or I'd have food poisoning all the time! Anyway as with all bad there has to be some good and it does make great meringues. I thought this is the perfect opportunity to try fermenting some garlic in the porridge making oven.
I found these instructions on how to make black garlic, you can also see a pic of it on the link
http://www.ehow.com/how_5902625_make-black-garlic.html
I bought the best garlic I could find and a little glass dish to place them in and away we go for the next 40 days. Actually I 'm not sure if the oven is hot enough even for this as it is about ready for a service but I'm having a go.
I just need to be patient now but as that compartment of the oven hasn't been used for ages it should be ok.
All will be revealed on July 10th.
