While the rest of Deep Ellum bounced from music venue to serious slices on Friday night, I sat in a small makeshift restaurant in an unmarked building on Elm Street. The simple gray structure typically hosts My Private Chef, a Dallas-based food service that provides pre-cooked meals customers can eat at home. But on Friday night chef David Anthony Temple took over the space hosting an underground meal, serving up multiple courses for a collection of food-obsessed friends.
I'll save the details of the meal for another time, but I was reminded about the dessert this morning when I stumbled on an article in Details that listed five stealthy ingredients popular chefs employ. David Chang was listed with a reference to black garlic, used pureed, roasted and raw. "They add depth and pair well with almost every protein," he said of the ingredient and its various forms.
Black garlic is a fermented product formed when raw garlic cloves are stored in a temperature- and humidity-controlled environment for a month or so. The result are jet-black cloves with a soft chewy consistency, little to no pungency and sweet, almost molasses-like flavor. As Chang hinted, the cloves work well in many savory preparations, but that sweet quality also makes for interesting desserts.
Temple steered the ingredient toward the sweet side of things, serving up a soft ice cream flecked with black garlic. The ice cream blanketed a pear tart, invoking rich and earthy flavors that lead me to wonder if black garlic is the new chocolate.
Wanna play along? There are hundreds of recipes online, and the ingredient can be purchased at internet gourmet stores easily. But really you out to pay a visit to Tom Spicer, who carries the product in his garden-driven Spiceman's FM 1410 store, at 1410 B North Fitzhugh Avenue, 214-404-9104.
