With its perfect balance of umami and antioxidant health benefits, Black Garlic is gaining popularity as a go-to culinary finishing touch.
Garlicious Grown Co-owner Jenny Daniher and her business partner Cathy Owen started out small growing and processing it on their Braidwood, NSW farms for family and friends. Now they have hundreds of stockists across Australia selling their powders, pastes and whole cloves.
To manage all those stockists they had a system in place, but then discovered Upstock.
“We were using another system, that meant we had to manually put everything in. To be honest, initially, we thought, ‘This Upstock sounds too good to be true’. I was sceptical, ‘Was this really gonna be worth it?’ But the time that it saves, yep, it's definitely worth it. And then after a while, I thought ‘This is a no-brainer, why would you not use this?’ I really do love it.”
Much of Jenny's job is educating customers about how it can elevate everything from a gourmet cheese board to cheese on toast. And she loves the buzz of being discovered by new customers.
“When we got our first random order we went, ‘Oh, where did this come from?’ And it was from Upstock. It was pretty exciting. We could quite well see an increase in new retailers just from being on Upstock.”
She can see the possibilities for chefs too.
“You know if you go onto just about any restaurant website nine times out of ten it'll tell you that they want to support local farmers and local suppliers and local producers and they want to buy Australian.”
Jenny says chefs looking for a quick, easy way to discover the best Australian specialty suppliers should definitely give Upstock a crack.
“What I really love is being able to tell our stockists and chefs is, there's no fee to you, you've just got to jump on board. Upstock makes it easy for us and easy for you because you don't even have to talk to us, you can just type in what you want, send it and it's done.”
More from our chat with Garlicious Grown’s Co-owner Jenny Daniher
Give us the lowdown - what is Black Garlic and how can we use it?
First and foremost it's not a variety it's actually a process so we start with a really good quality white garlic called Monaro. Then we hold it at low temperature and high humidity for 30 days and it goes through what's called a Maillard reaction, a bit like when an apple goes brown when you cut it. During the process, it goes from white through to cream and then caramel and then by day 30, it's quite black. It's an oxidation process that changes everything about the garlic. So it's not just the colour, it changes the flavour, the texture. So it's your finishing touch on lots of things or even simple things like putting it on a cheese board instead of quince paste. You put cloves of black garlic to spread on your cracker with your cheese and it is delicious. Check out Jenny’s other black garlic recipes and ideas here
What’s your favourite thing about using Upstock?
I think it would be the time saved ringing up to approach stores for orders. Definitely, it saves time on entering into Xero. I know you think, ‘Oh yeah, that only takes five minutes to enter all that stuff into an invoice’, but if you have five minutes, 10 times a day, well, there's nearly an hour. So I think it would easily have saved us two or three hours a week, which is great.
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