Black Garlic – it’s a no-no.

I’ve updated this article as of 2/13/09, after some email dialouge

A few weeks back, on a steamy hot Saturday afternoon, the Artist and I braved the heat to venture to a Top Chef event.  We weren’t sure what we were going to see, but it turned out to be a fun afternoon.

There were two chefs from Season 4 (Antonia and Ryan, both whom I loved on the show).  They were in town doing some promo work for the show and treated us (and about 10 others) to a live demo/talk in a promotional trailer that was thankfully air conditioned!  Antonia made a super yummy seared duck breast served over some sort of slaw in a radicchio cup (I wish I had written this down at the time, but I was on five hours of sleep from the past 24 hours, so my mind wasn’t “on”).  Ryan was the sous chef as Antonia cooked, and both were personable, chatty, and just darn cute in their own way.

They did some q&a as they went along, and from that, and from one of the ingredients they used, I learned about black garlic.  Now, I’m a garlic fan, so it sounded interesting.  I think I was so tired (again, that darn five hours of sleep!) that I didn’t hear them say “black garlic is marinated in soy sauce.”  Thankfully, the Artist caught that and said to me, “You can’t eat that.”

“What are you talking about?”, I said.  He then told me what the chefs said.  Man, I was glad he was around to watch out for me.  He’s good to me like that.

So just a warning out there for all of you foodies and spiceheads – black garlic is not gluten free.  Here’s a link to an article about black garlic.  If you’re like me, you have probably told everyone that cooks for you that “All spices are safe.  It’s seasonings that you have to watch out for.”  Not the case anymore….we have to be very careful of what we eat, and black garlic is a spice, and on the no list.

UPDATE 2/13/09
I’ve been emailing back and forth with someone from blackgarlic.com, who has said the following:

Since black garlic is categorized as asian dish, people automatically associate its color to the soy sauce.  Truth is black garlic is not ancient dish from any asian counties.  It’s a new product and it was developed about 5-6 years ago.  We were the first one to mass produce and patented black garlic production technique in korea.  However, we spotted few imitation products imported from China and some actually use soy sauce to change the color of the garlic.  Obvioiusly, since they have no way to know our special techinque, they probably had to add something into the garlic.  Now there are soy sauce pickled garlic dish in Korea, but this is vastly different from our black garlic, and Koraens do not called that ‘black garlic’.

When we produce black garlic, we don’t add anything.  No sugar, No Soy Sauce, etc. Just garlic.  Since garlic is gluten free, our black garlic product can not possibly have gluten.  I checked with our product advisor at U.C. Davis and he also stated same.  No additives during black garlic process, thus no gluten.

It is very possible that some other imitaion black garlic products to use soy sauce or other additives during the production, and those products may or may not have gluten.  But as for our black garlic, we only use garlic and heat.

We had a customer asking gluten question back in December (due to celiac disease), but customer did not have any problem with our product.

Our product was featured on Top Chef, and product you saw on Top Chef is our product.  However, it looks like our distribution partner did not clearly informed staffs and chefs.

Anyway, if you can add addendum regarding our product that is fine

GFS