Aioli

SVCBadass's chicken recipe made me think of this. It's great with grilled chicken, fish, or barbecued meat, asparagus, salad leaves, or purple sprouting brocolli, or just with chips. It also forms the basis of a very interesting fish sauce, which I'll cover at a later date.

Like anything with raw eggs, you shouldn't eat this if there's any likelihood of you being pregnant, or if your immune system is compromised: salmonella is pretty rare, but it can cripple an unborn child, or kill you, if you're very unlucky. Even healthy young men can find themselves shitting and puking explosively, for a couple of days, often with added blood. It's worth the risk though, I think.

Ingredients

Lots of garlic
Salt, ideally in big flakes
Two or three free range egg yolks
A teaspoon of mustard
Pinch of cayenne
Lemon juice
A 50/50 mix of olive oil and sunflower oil

Kit
A scrupulously clean big glass bowl
Fork or whisk
A similarly clean jug or bottle for pouring oil

Principles
The idea of this, or of any mayonnaise style sauce, is to create an emulsion: tiny beads of one fluid, suspended in another. Egg whites, water, traces of washing up liquid, or any of a range of other contaminants will stop the emulsion forming, so everything needs to be clean.

Method

Peel and chop the garlic. Once you've chopped it as small as you can get, sprinkle over some salt. Use the flat of the knife to crush the salt into the garlic, wriggling the blade across the salt/garlic mix. You'll pretty quickly get a smooth garlic paste. You could use a garlic press, but it's not much easier, and the time you save using the press will be wasted when you come to try clean the damn thing.

Seperate the eggs. Crack the shell in two, and carefully pour the egg from one half shell to the other, until all the white has come away, and just the yolk is left. Alternatively, crack the egg into your hand, and let the white dribble out through your slightly parted fingers. This way, you can pick any strands of white that stick to the yolk away with your fingertips.

Put the yolks in your very clean bowl, and add the garlic paste. Beat them together thoroughly.

Add a teaspoon of (dijon) mustard and a pinch of cayenne. The mustard seems to help the emulsifacation process. Both ingredients add a little bit more kick to the finished sauce.

Pour in a teaspoon full of the olive/vegetable oil mix. Whisk thoroughly, until the oil is absorbed in the garlic/yolk mix. If any oil is visible, you need to keep beating it.

Add another teaspoon full of oil, and beat in again.

As the emulsion starts to form, it will be able to take more oil at once. So, pour in maybe a tablespoon full on the third go, then a couple of tablespoons, and so on.

With two eggs, you should be able to add around half a pint of oil. If everything works, you should have a stiff, glossy, emulsion, that clings to the underside of a spoon without falling off.

At this point, the aioli will still be bright yellow. You can eat it like that, but it's prettier and tastier if you add the juice of a lemon. Just squeeze the lemon right in, and whisk it a little. The sauce will become a bit thinner, and the acid in the lemon will somehow make the colour a lot lighter, if not white.

You can serve this right away, but I find an hour or two in the fridge helps the flavours blend better. It will last happily in the fridge for three or four days. A yellow skin will form on the surface, but you can just stir this back in before serving.

Comments

What can go wrong?

Well, the sauce can split: that is, the the oil stops forming an emulsion, and won't mix in. You can fix this though. Just get a fresh, clean, bowl, add a new egg yolk, and add the split sauce from your first attempt in the same way as the oil: a little at first, beat thoroughly, then a bit more, and so on.

The l33t method
Once you've made emulsions a few times, and if you can do two things at once, you can add the oil continuously. Put the oil in a bottle with a pouring cap, pour it in a thin trickle with one hand, while beating with the other. It doesn't make the finished sauce any better, but it's quicker and will impress anyone who's watching.

Stoned mayo
Like any dish that uses oils, you can make a stoned version (the active ingredients in cannabis are oil soluble). Put some oil in a bowl, and suspend the oil in a pot of barely simmering water. Roughly chop some buds, and drop them in the oil. Warm (not heat) it slowly, stirring occasionally, for about ten minutes. Sieve out the buds, and add the cooled cannabis infusion to the rest of the oil. Try adding some tarragon or basil to the sauce once it's made, to balance the flavour of the 'erb.

Serving suggestion
Get a ridged cast iron griddle pan, and heat until it's smoking. Place a chicken breast skin side down on the griddle. Leave for a couple of minutes, and then turn it through 90 degrees, to give an attractive cross-hatched pattern of scorch marks. Flip the chicken over, and repeat the process.

Get some asparagus, and snap off the woody ends (don't bother using a knife, if you just put your thumb on the base of the shoot, it will snap at the right point). Add them to the griddle, across the ridges. Grill for three or four minutes, turning them over half way through.

Serve with boiled new potatoes or chips, and a bottle of crisp white wine.

Use your fingers to pick up the asparagus, and dip it into the sauce. Put the firm, pungent sauce covered, head of the asparagus between your dining partners lips. They may just get a hint...

a good addition is 1 large roasted red bell pepper. you may roats your self or purchase in a tin. make sure you blend the pepper well before and then add at the same time as the eggs.. Gives a great smoky flavor ( you can also roast the garlic first to help with flavor)

mmmmm u gota b fairly skilled 2 make mayonaise, as ive made a hollendaise b4 and a bernasie b4, good skill is needed, and end result is tasty