The Black Garlic Machine

It’s called a black garlic fermenter but it doesn’t “ferment” the garlic so I don’t want to call it a fermenter.

Yesterday I peeled the last of the garlic that was in the proofer, folded it up and put it away. I’m hoping the black garlic machine will work as I’m anticipating it should because it will be faster and it takes up less space.

Some of the garlic I took out was really big, much bigger than most garlic we can buy in stores, and it took it about 5 – 6 weeks to get completely black and even then, some of it isn’t totally black. If it’s just dark brown, it still has a bit of a garlic taste and isn’t hard, but it isn’t smooth and soft either.

Once it’s black, as shown below, you can spread it with a knife and it is so sweet. When I want something sweet, I often open the fridge and grab a couple of cloves of this. I know it’s hard to believe but it tastes nothing like garlic and is really as sweet as candy, but yet is supposed to retain the health benefits of garlic.

Above is a container I fixed to take to Chad’s for them to try it.

The only drawback so far (and I don’t have my first batch done yet) is that this little rack was not made for home grown garlic. I had to squeeze, turn and finagle to get some of those bulbs in there and those aren’t the biggest ones. I was able to dig around and find some smaller bulbs to fill in gaps just to fill it up.

It’s loaded and ready to start.

The longest setting is 12 days. I will be gone so Vince will have to test it. My guess is that 12 days will be fine for the smaller bulbs but the larger ones may need more time. Even if takes 15 – 18 days, it will be way faster than the proofer.

It looks like you can also put individual cloves in there where it says “solo” or “garlic”.

Some of the reviews on this machine were negative, but all the negatives ones I read were because of poor instructions. It makes you wonder if these people have ever successfully used any kind of electric appliance. The Chinese to English translation was funny in spots but it was not hard to figure out how to use it. One of the things it said was to “shake the garlic quietly” and I think it means “shake gently”. Another place where it talks about how easy it is to clean – “No internal residual sewage after washing” which I think would be better stated “waste” vs. sewage. But, if I were translating from English to Chinese . . well, that isn’t going to happen. So, I shouldn’t be laughing. Someone is way more educated than I am!

Anyway, I’m really anxious to see how this turns out. We had 5 big (like 3′ x 8′) trays of garlic. We’ve used one . . four more remaining. Believe it or not, we’ll plant garlic again in October. I’ll use some of what I have as “seeds” but we definitely have enough garlic to last us til next year’s crop.