Chef Jon…
Black Garlic Ranch Dressing Black Garlic softens the garlic flavor, rounding it out, deepening it with subtle aniseed notes
Jon Bignelli worked at New York’s under Wylie DuFresne since 2007, before being brought to run the kitchen at DuFresne’s , where he ran the kitchen until just recently when the restaurant closed. There he took a playful approach to comfort food by turning pastrami on rye into pasta and making pigs in a blanket with Chinese sausage and homemade duck sauce.
Black Garlic is really cool. It has an aggressive flavor, and once the garlic ferments it becomes soft and pasty if you press on it. It’s hard to explain, to be honest, because it doesn’t taste anything like raw garlic anymore. Raw white garlic can be really strong and astringent, Black Garlic softens the garlic flavor, rounding it out, deepening it with subtle aniseed notes. And there are other unrecognizable flavors in there, too.
It’s really complex and delicious, which is why I don’t normally do much to it. But I like to combine it with buttermilk, vinegar, and some oil to make something that tastes very similar to ranch dressing. I take around 100 grams of Black Garlic, 300 grams of buttermilk, maybe 25 grams of Champagne vinegar, five grams of salt, three grams of black pepper, and about 300 grams of grapeseed or olive oil. Put everything into a blender except the oil, puree it, and then slowly stream in your oil. It’s really good as a sauce for roast chicken or lamb.
[Photograph: Courtesy of Alder] by Jacqueline Raposo- https://wordsfoodart.com
