At the heart of delicious meals
Our New Zealand Garlic, Shallots & Black Garlic transform any occasion into an exciting, healthy and tasty gourmet experience. We love our Black Garlic on crackers with cheese, and our Garlic and Shallots in stir fries or curries!
Our New Zealand garlic has more flavour and a cleaner taste than most other garlic, so you can get better results from your cooking while using less
It has a strong, pungent and slightly heated taste. A lot of people will associate garlic with having a strong, spicy flavour that mellows and sweetens when cooked. It is widely accepted that garlic can zap bacteria, keep your heart healthy, and ward off coughs and colds.
Shallots have a mild taste that combines the flavour of a sweet onion with a touch of garlic. They can be used in similar dishes to ones where garlic and onions are used, but have a more subtle gourmet taste than onions and tend to have a faster cooking time.
Some varieties of shallots are more elongated than others, while some are more rounded.
Our shallots are available throughout the year.
Like garlic, shallots are great for you. Packed with dietrary fibre, vitamin C, potassium, folate, vitamin A, Vitamin B6 and manganese. They are a great for circulation and help decrease blood pressure.
Our Black Garlic is a taste sensation
It has a truly unique sweet and savoury umami flavour, that adds a rich, deep complexity to any dish without overpowering it.
We slow roast our garlic for around 6 weeks, triggering a type of fermentation called the Maillard effect. The ONLY ingredient is the garlic we have grown in the field. During fermentation it begins to colour up, eventually becoming jet black.
It looks fantastic on a platter with the jet-black morsels contrasting brilliantly with the colour of cheeses and other gourmet treats. We take a little longer than most to cook our black garlic to make sure it achieves the deep black colour and umami taste that is particular to good black garlic.
Our Black Garlic is great for you, with studies suggesting;
- Up to a 7 fold increase in the polyphenol content of regular garlic (Sato et al., 2006)
- An increase in antioxidant activity and amino acid content (Chao et al., 2012),
- Increased anti-inflammatory properties (Lee et al., 2011)
- Hepatoprotective activity (Kim et al., 2011b)
- Immunostimulatory activities (Purev et al., 2012).
- And higher free radical scavenging properties in vitro (Kim et al. 2012) compared with fresh garlic.
We plant our garlic and shallots August/September and harvest in January/February. Our growing stretches from our home base in the Awatere Valley, Marlborough to the shadow of the Southern Alps on the Canterbury plains.
Every year we grow around 500 tonnes of premium fresh garlic, with an additional 50 tonnes for restaurant use, and 10 tonnes fermented into Black Garlic. We grow around 300 tonnes of shallots.
The aggressive rotation required by Allium crops has forced us to look far-and-wide for the right soils and climate for garlic – the sunny days and frosty nights of Marlborough and Canterbury are ideal.
Garlic is traditionally planted on the shortest day of the year, and harvested on the longest day of the year. We plant and harvest our garlic later because over time the varieties we use have adapted to New Zealand conditions. Garlic grows from a clove which dies over the course of the growing season, leaving in its place a shoot which in 6 months time becomes a bulb.
We plant garlic by machine and use a mix of machine and human labour for harvest. During harvest the leafy part of the plant is topped. Following time drying in the sun in the paddock, our garlic is cured using forced air dryers specifically built for drying garlic.
All Murphy’s New Zealand products are fully traceability from field-to-fork as we grow, pack and process our products.
We are an NZGAP accredited and approved supplier. This is a way for us to ensure that we exercise good social practice and use good procedure in our growing operation.
We have a range of audited systems that assure that our food production is appropriate for consumers.
We run a Custom Food Control Plan that meets the requirements of the Food Act 2014, Food Regulations 2015 and relevant notices.
A Food Safety & Quality Management Programme (HACCP Plan).
Our packhouse is accredited to export product by the Ministry of Primary Industries.
Our Black Garlic is produced as part of our Food Safety and Quality Management Programme HACCP plan.
Our field and pack-house staff are absolutely key to our operation. Their hard work and attention to detail ensures that quality product reaches your plate.
Before our garlic is ready for the market, the roots are clipped by hand and the product is cleaned in our pack house.
Our product is spread widely around New Zealand in supermarkets, specialty stores and wholesalers but if you think your local retailer should stock some let us know who it is. You can also order this from our online store.