Black garlic...one of my new favourite ingredients??

So...I recently found out about a really cool ingredient: Black Garlic. I initially considered making my own, but it takes 8-10 days in a rice cooker, and I didn't have that much time so I decided to skip it. Anyways, here's the dish - turmeric pasta with a mushroom and black garlic sauce...kind of basic but I loved it. 

You've seen my turmeric pasta before, but if you don't remember, it is 3 eggs, 1.5 tablespoons of turmeric and about 250 grams of OO flour, along with extra if needed. I would suggest that you experiment with a bit more turmeric, because it's an important flavour in the dish. 

The mushroom sauce is a tad more complex. The goal of the sauce is to highlight black garlic, and therefore to pick flavours that work with it. The 4 main flavours I found were mushrooms, turmeric, cream and dijon mustard. I decided that these were the flavours that I wanted in my sauce. Starting with the mushrooms, I stir fried them with some onions, some herbs and chilli. I then pureed them till they were chunky along with some dijon. This went into a pan and was heated with some cream to make a sauce, after which a bit of black garlic was added. 

Here's a mistake of mine here...black garlic is soft but it doesn't break down in a sauce. I chose not to blend the garlic thinking it would dissipate on its own, but it did not. Instead, the sauce contained whole cloves of it. The advantage of this, though, is that the whole cloves create packets of flavour, which I think actually worked better in the dish than I intended.

Before I end this post, I wanted to list some of the flavour notes of black garlic, because it's an incredible ingredient that I think works really well in a lot of dishes. It has a flavour akin to that of balsamic vinegar, and the original flavour of raw garlic is almost gone. There is a sweetness to it, and there is a slightly umami flavour, but this is quite low intensity.

I definitely encourage you to attempt using this ingredient, and if you do...tell me how you did!!