Black Garlic is the latest addition to my daily arsenal. Yasumi Gojo of Healing Seitai gave me a few heads of black garlic and asked me to try them. Her husband made them in an old rice cooker and she was sharing it with her clients. Some of them reported better blood pressure and better health. Pal Ryuko who is in the beginning stages of Parkinson’s says it makes her feel stronger. I think that it is making my grey hair black again!

I began to eat one clove a day in the morning and increased to 3 cloves a day. I do like the taste of garlic and the only difficult part of it is peeling the paper off – but it is easy enough to do.

Yasumi taught me how to make this great health supplement with a rice cooker, and I now make my own black garlic with a lot of extra to share.

The recipe

• Peel off most of the paper from each head of garlic (actually, this step is not necessary). I use the Christopher Ranch bag of raw garlic from Costco because it is grown in California. I can fit about 18 heads of garlic in the 5 cup rice cooker.
• Lay down a layer of wooden chopsticks or popsicle sticks on the bottom of the rice pot so the garlic is not resting on metal. Cover the sticks with a paper towel, then pile in the garlic heads. Try to keep the garlic away from the side of the pot so it doesn’t burn. Cover the pile of garlic with another paper towel.
• Close the lid, plug in the rice cooker, and set it on “warm”. Leave the rice cooker on warm for 10 days. The smell is quite strong during the first few days so I keep it in the garage. Unplug the cooker and remove the bulbs when cool enough to handle.

And that’s it! I store the blackened bulbs in a bowl on my kitchen counter and peel and eat 3 cloves every morning. When my supply starts to get small, I start a new batch in the rice cooker. Actually, I am constantly making batches of black garlic because I like to share with others who are interested and may have some issues that it could help, just as Yasumi Gojo shared with me.

Costco also sells black garlic. I like the bottle it comes in, and each bulb has only one round clove in it! However, it is rather pricey and it is also from China. Pal Wandaful said she looked up “black garlic from China” and didn’t like how sketchy their practices are with bleach and questionable fertilizers.

I think that I am having more benefits from taking black garlic than my hair getting darker, but I can’t say for sure. It is a natural remedy that has and entourage effect. I just learned about that while researching the benefits of CBD and cannabis. It is the effect on one’s body that doesn’t just treat one thing. It treats everything.

And for that, I am more than willing to have garlic breath in the morning until I brush my teeth. And since we still wear face masks, nobody really notices anyway.