13 September 2009

Aioli

We (my parents, Bip and I) first made our acquaintance with aioli in Spain (and there they call it alioli). This is many, many years ago and a few years back, my Mum worked out how to make it and would always make loads and it would run out really fast.

Well, finally I've got round to making this myself, it's a lot easier than you might think. OK, so I used technology - the blender attachment on my trusty Kitchen Assistent.

I also had a couple of elephant garlics from a visit to this year's Chili Fiesta at West Dean. It's from the stand of The Garlic Farm and it's the first time I've seen these in real life - They are massive - think grapefruit size and each had "only" five cloves, but each was the size of a golf ball. They said the elephant garlic is milder flavoured and that it was ideal for roasting. I planted the cloves from one of the bulbs and used 2/3 of a clove to make aioli. That seemed to be about 2-3 regular cloves of garlic.

Ingredients

2-3 cloves of garlic
1 medium egg
about 400 ml grapeseed oil
2-3 tbsp water (if needed)
1 tbsp lemon juice
salt to taste

Method
  1. Peel and cut the garlic in chunks and place in a blender, along with the egg and some salt.

  2. Blend on high and slowly start pouring the grapeseed oil.

  3. If it gets too thick, add water a tbsp at a time.

  4. Depending on how strong garlic flavour you want, you can stop blending before the 400 ml oil has been added, or you can keep adding more.

  5. At the end, add the lemon juice and more salt if needed.

I served these with the wonderful bread sticks from my Dough book by Richard Bertinet. I made two types from the dough batch recipe - one with sesame seeds and one with poppy seeds. I didn't follow the instructions of folding in three, but only folded in two. I got about 20 sticks out of that and they worked ever so well for dipping. I also made hummus and had some of the now very spicy olive oil from the pickled roasted chillies. I also put some olive oil, but that didn't quite compete with the other dips.

Hottest tip from my Mum - do not use olive oil! It goes solid in the fridge and can cause the aioli to separate and go funny.

And sorry no photos, things disappeared way too quickly for that.

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