Spaghetti with Black Garlic and Oil

 

 

Here's the first thing I tried with Black Garlic and it is a good, good thing.  I used one head of the black garlic I made, but it was really big, so you might need two heads if working with medium-sized garlic.  While I love the almost syrupy sweetness and umami of the black garlic, I found I wanted to add a couple of cloves of un-blackened garlic (formerly known as "garlic") to  make the sauce a little more garlicky.

Spaghetti with Black Garlic and Oil

4 ounces spaghetti

1 very large or 2 medium heads black garlic

2 very large or 4 medium cloves garlic

olive oil (be liberal)

salt

parsley, if you have some

Cook the pasta in liberally salted water.  While the pasta is cooking, warm olive oil in a skillet.   Peel the black garlic and mash the cloves with some of the starchy pasta-water.  Slice some of the raw garlic and cook it in the hot oil for a moment and add the mashed black garlic.  Add the cooked pasta to the pan, and grate in the rest of the raw garlic.  Add more pasta water as needed and taste for salt.  If you have some parsley, that is lovely too.

Got that?  Three garlics!  First, sauté some sliced garlic, then add the black garlic, finally, microplane in some raw garlic.

In The Food Lab, a book I recommend so ardently that I have caused some alarm, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has a recipe for spaghetti with three garlics: slow-cooked, quick-cooked, and almost raw.  This is good and I have had great joy using the same technique in other garlic-intensive recipes like ratatouille. I am thinking I would like to make this  into spaghetti with five garlics: Kenji's three garlics, black garlic, and this garlic confit. 

 And sure, scapes too, in season.  Six garlics.