Toum: fiery garlic sauce (without eggs)

This crazy intense garlic sauce is like a mayonnaise or aioli but contains no eggs which are typically used to emulsify those classics.  It's become a staple in our kitchen, good on paella, potatoes, vegetables, grilled octopus, and shockingly good on pizza. It's easy to make in a food processor.

A strong stable emulsion, without any egg

We had squid with a fiery garlic sauce that was blindingly white at a small Sicilian place, Caffe Sport, in San Francisco decades ago; that flavor and color have stuck with me to this day. We've tried to create it with various aioli in Catalan, Spanish, and French styles. The French ones use egg, which gave a yellow color and diluted the flavor; Jose Andres does the classic Spanish prep, crushing garlic in a mortar and pestle and adding oil drop-by-drop; we've tried it, only to have it break when we finished 30 minutes later.

We found a Lebanese garlic sauce called "Toum" that sounded right: lots of garlic, plus oil, salt and a bit of lemon juice -- no egg.  We whipped one up based on the Serious Eats recipe, which was similar to many others we found.  Garlic is whizzed in a food processor with some salt to break it down, releasing the juices that contain the weak emulsifier, then oil is added very very slowly to establish the emulsion, then alternate lemon juice and oil to finish. 

When you've finished the sauce, don't be tempted to add (say) more lemon juice and whiz it up again: the emulsion will break when you turn on the processor.  The garlic should be fresh: old or frozen or processed won't set up as a stable emulsion. You can rescue it by whizzing an egg in the empty processor then drizzling in the broken Toum, and it will taste fine: but it's cheating with the egg, and doesn't have quite the pure garlic burn: it's an aioli. 

The flavor is a bit shocking right after making it, but it softens with time. We keep it in the fridge but it might be stable without refrigeration: unlike eggs in mayo, none of Toum's ingredients requires being chilled. We've substituted Sherry Vinegar for the Lemon and it came out very well for a Spanish dish we were serving. 

Makes almost 500 ml [16 ounces] of sauce. 

 75 g   2.5 oz   Garlic heads, peeled (see technique below)
  6 g     1 tsp  Kosher Salt
 30 ml    2 Tbs  Lemon Juice
350 ml  1.5 C    Oil, Canola (neutral flavored)

Ingredients assembled

Put the garlic heads into a metal mixing bowl and cover with another. Shake violently: the heads will break apart, the paper will start separating; pull out the peeled cloves and repeat a couple times until all coves are peeled. This takes just a few minutes.

Garlic after first shake in mixing bowls

Add Garlic and Salt to food processor and process to break down garlic and release internal emulsifiers as much as possible; you may want to scrape down the sides a bit.

Garlic (lots of it) and coarse Salt to break it down

Drizzle the Lemon Juice in so that it provides liquid to turn the garlic into more of a paste consistency, scrape down once or twice; it should be mostly mush, with some garlic bits.

Not quite broken-down enough yet, scrape and process a bit more

Slowly drizzle in the Oil -- my processor top has a feed tube with a small hole that releases a slow drizzle for just this kind of operation; the sauce should start turning into a rich emulsion in a minute or two, you can hear the change in texture, but I run it for a few minutes and don't bother scraping down during this process.

A thing of beauty: thick and fluffy, and very smelly :-)

Scrape out into serving or storage containers. 
Do try it at its freshest, it's an eye-opener. :-)

In Barcelona with only a mini-chopper

We don't have a food processor here, only a stick blender with a mini-chopper bowl, so we make a smaller batch. Most annoyingly, we can't drizzle the oil through a feed tube, but have to process, open, add a bit of oil, repeat, repeat; it works.  Both The Mediterranean Dish and Serious Eats add the Lemon early to help blend the Garlic and prevent breaking the sauce. Comments in Serious Eats suggest having all ingredients cold to prevent breaking but I haven't tried that yet.

This makes about 300 ml of sauce.

  1 head   Garlic, cloves separated and peeled

  3 g      Salt

  1 whole  Juice from Lemon

200 ml     Oil, Sunflower (or mix of oils)

In the bowl of a mini chopper, process the Garlic with Salt; open and push the chunks to the bottom of the bowl and repeat until it's as mushed as it will get.

Add the Lemon Juice and repeat processing until smooth.

Add a tiny bit of Oil and process.

Repeat until all the Oil is used; you can add larger quantities after the emulsion sets up, but don't rush or it will break; this may take 10 minutes or so.

You should have a fairly fluffy mayonnaise-like sauce.