Sunday, July 13, 2008

Aioli

The giant roast rack of pork that I made provided us with more than enough leftovers. Conveniently, there is a recipe in the book that makes use of the leftovers. What is it, you might ask? Well you'll just have to wait a little while longer for that post. For now you'll just have to live with knowing that I needed some aioli for it.

Aioli is really just garlic flavored mayonnaise, and the ingredients are pretty simple. There is olive oil, salt, an egg, and garlic confit.

I started by completely obliterating the garlic by mixing in the salt and then smashing it repeatedly. And smashing it. And smashing it. It looked kind of gross at the end, but it smelled great.

I put the egg in a large bowl and then whisked in the garlic paste. There was an option to use an immersion blender for the whisking, but alas, I could not seem to find my immersion blender. Or I don't have one. Damn. About ten minutes later I would really want one though, does that count?



At this point the process involved just whisking constantly while slowly adding in the oil.

The aioli gradually grew in volume and thickened in texture.

Finally it was done. I let my arm recover for a few minutes while I contemplated what I had just made. It didn't look that good, somewhere between yellow cake batter and smashed bananas. It smelled like garlic, a lot. It tasted quite good though, mostly like garlic and a little like mayo.

I needed about two tablespoons of the stuff for my recipe, but now I have seemingly three gallons of it in my fridge. Anyone need some aioli, I'm certainly not going to use it all. At least not without suffering from a giant heart attack.

4 comments:

Kitt said...

No fair! I tried to make mayo a couple of weeks ago and completely failed at it. Then I read you could take your failed attempt and drizzle it into a new batch of yolks and save it that way.

Eight eggs later I threw it out and opened a bottle of Kewpie mayo instead.

Kudos to you.

mike said...

kitt,

The recipe in Bouchon specifically says to use a whole egg, as it helps to strengthen the emulsion. I think that's probably more of a reason of success here than my amazing mayo making abilities.

Adam said...

Aioli by hand? Without a blender or immersion mixer? You must have arms like Popeye!

mike said...

Ha, not yet, but maybe after a few more batches...