Garlic From End Times

Garlic begins white, crisp, and aggressive. Fresh Perspective Organic Black Garlic is garlic transformed by controlled heat, humidity, and time. People often call the process fermentation, but the blackening mainly comes from the Maillard reaction, the same broad family of browning reactions that makes toast, seared steak, and the corner of the lasagna worth fighting your own child for.

The heat softens the cloves and changes that raw-garlic assault into something sweet, tangy, deeply savory, and spreadable. The darkness is proof that sharp, pale garlic has crossed over into umami paste. Mash it into butter, mayonnaise, vinaigrette, mashed potatoes, soup, or a grilled cheese. Stir it into a pan sauce. Smear it directly on toast if you have stopped needing other people’s approval.

Sun Fact: During totality, the Moon’s darkest shadow is called the umbra. Inside it, the Sun is completely covered. Inside this bag, the garlic is completely covered in evidence that controlled darkness can improve a personality. (OK, fine, we were goth in high school, sue us).

The Dark Side of the Pasta

Ordinary linguine is the color of office drywall. Dependable, inoffensive, and difficult to remember afterward. Morelli Organic Linguine with Black Squid Ink and Wheat Germ arrives looking like the pasta course at a very tasteful séance.

Antico Pastificio Morelli has been family-run in Tuscany since 1860 and is now in its fifth generation. This linguine is turned intensely black with cuttlefish ink. The ink does more than commit to the wardrobe: it adds a delicate briny depth, while the wheat germ brings a fuller wheat fragrance during cooking.

It cooks in 5 to 6 minutes, so do not wander off to research flights to Bilbao. Toss it with olive oil, lemon, parsley, chile, and shrimp or scallops. The black noodles make bright seafood, herbs, and tomatoes look indecently good. Regular pasta carries sauce. This pasta carries sauce while wearing evening clothes and a mask, living underneath a Paris opera house.

Sun Fact: The Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, is normally drowned out by the bright solar disk and becomes visible during totality. This pasta performs the opposite trick: the black background makes everything around it brighter. Astronomy calls that contrast. Dinner guests call it suspiciously, unusually competent. Earn the compliment.

Chocolate Can't Get Darker Than This

Most chocolate contains cacao, sugar, and a negotiated settlement between bitterness and your dental work. Alter Eco Total Blackout is 100% cacao, with two ingredients: organic cacao beans and organic cocoa butter. No sugar added. The sugar was shown the door and asked not to make a scene.

Removing the sugar lets the color go darker and the cacao stop speaking through a chaperone. Alter Eco combines the malty intensity of Ecuadorian cacao with the fruitier character of Dominican cacao, then uses Swiss conching to make the texture smoother than a 100% bar has any right to be. It is intense, roasty, fruity, and properly bitter. People who call 70% chocolate “very dark” may want a fainting couch (or pacifier) nearby.

Eat a little square slowly with coffee, nuts, aged cheese, or a ripe blackberry. The fruit makes the cacao taste rounder; the cacao makes the fruit taste brighter. It also works chopped into cookies, brownies, oatmeal, or anything that needs chocolate depth without another shovel of sugar.

Sun Fact: The Sun is about 400 times wider than the Moon, but also about 400 times farther away, so the two appear almost exactly the same size from Earth. An astonishing cosmic coincidence… or is it??