It comes in bite-sized cloves with a distinct sheen and a brownish-black hue. Touch one and you’ll find it buoyant under pressure and slightly sticky. The aroma is slightly floral and smoky. The smokiness carries over to the flavor, with a sweetness reminiscent of balsamic vinegar.
This is black garlic, fresh bulbs that have undergone two to three weeks of low-temperature roasting. The process can turn the simple root vegetable into a fairly expensive condiment.
Black garlic isn’t a new food phenom; it’s been used in Asian cooking and medicine for centuries. A U.K. garlic grower unearthed a 4,000-year-old Korean recipe for the vegetable. For Sauk County personal chef Mitch Maier, black garlic is providing a new direction and evolving product line for his business, Out of the Kitchen LLC.
Maier grew up in food service, starting at age 9 as a dishwasher for The Dorf Haus in Roxbury, the supper club founded by his parents, Vern and Betty Maier, and still run by his siblings. Maier ended up doing everything in the restaurant, then used funding from the GI Bill (after a tour in Vietnam with the U.S. Army) to attend Madison College’s culinary program.
Yet he had never heard of black garlic until a few years ago, when he saw a guest chef use black garlic at a chef demo at the Carr Valley Cheese store in Sauk City. The novel approach piqued Maier’s interest, and he began producing his own black garlic.
Making black garlic is a simple process. Heads of fresh garlic, the fresher the better, are placed inside a rice cooker in multiple layers. The cooker’s “keep warm” option lets the garlic cook for 288 hours at about 140 degrees Fahrenheit, providing the right amount of heat and humidity to turn the garlic cloves from off-white to deep black.
This isn’t caramelization (oxidation of the vegetable’s sugars) but a byproduct of the maillard reaction, the chemical interchange between sugars and amino acids that gives cooked meats their distinctive color and flavor.
“After making the first batch I had to find another place for the cooker because the whole house smelled like garlic,” Maier says.
He first cooked the garlic to replace Worcestershire sauce in a recipe for a client with a fish allergy. (Bonus: Once finished, black garlic has twice the antioxidants as fresh garlic.) His initial creation was a hit and he took the idea for a sauce line to the Wisconsin Innovation Kitchen in Mineral Point, which now produces his Mitch Maier’s Black Garlic Sauces and Marinades. The commercial food processing facility provides support and employment for area residents with disabilities.
He now buys his black garlic from Black Garlic North America, a Wisconsin Fermentation Company subsidiary located near Hillsboro that is the country’s largest supplier of bulbs.
“I buy a five-gallon bucket at a time and at $500 it’s pretty expensive,” Maier says. “But depending on the recipe I’m using I can usually get about 130 gallons of sauce out of one bucket.”
He soon followed his original sauce and marinade with a barbeque sauce and, in 2018, a ketchup. The initial ketchup run finished bottling Aug. 8, 2018, and Maier hurried a sample to the Wisconsin State Fair — where on Aug. 9, it won a ribbon.
He’s also experimenting with black garlic hot sauce, mustard and even a seltzer. Another item coming down the road in 2020 is a series of loose-leaf cookbooks featuring recipes for each of his three black garlic products.
Mitch Maier’s Black Garlic Sauces are available throughout southern Wisconsin. In the Madison area they can be found at Gino’s Italian Deli, Hy-Vee, UW Provision Company in Middleton, and both Miller & Sons Supermarkets. A 19-oz. bottle sells for around $17.
The sauces also are available through Amazon.com, and in mid-December, Maier made his inaugural sale there — black garlic ketchup — to a customer in Anchorage, Alaska.
