Toum is a Lebanese garlic sauce. It can be pretty potent depending on your processing of the garlic. It’s great on all sorts of things, though traditionally it’s used with chicken (especially shawarma) and as a dip for fries.
This recipe is pretty simple and quick, but you’re going to need an immersion blender and a scale.
I’m giving you a ratio, which should make it easy to to scale it as much as you want, but there is a minimum you can make (about 50g of garlic) depending on how deep your immersion blender’s bowl is.
The ratio is 1:2:4 lemon juice:garlic cloves:oil. I said it was simple!
Example, for a yield of about 250 ml (or roughly a cup container):
Ingredients #
- 25g lemon juice
- 50g peeled garlic, germ and stem end discarded (see note on prep)
- 100g neutral oil (I like sunflower, canola is fine) (see note on olive oil)
- salt (to taste, good rule of thumb is about 1g per 100g of oil)
- optional citric acid
Method #
We’ll be using Kenji López-Alt’s mayonnaise method to make the toum.
For a milder toum: place everything except citric acid into a container just wider than the head of your immersion blender. Use the blender head to push straight down, then turn it on while pushing down slowly. The toum should come together quickly, and you can tilt the head to pull in any remaining oil. Process until it’s a nice smooth cloud of a spread.
For a stronger toum: place the garlic and salt in the container and blend for a couple of seconds. Let sit for 30 seconds (or longer — the longer it sits, the more intense it becomes). Add lemon juice and oil, then process as above.
This will keep for a week or so in an air tight container in the fridge.
Prep #
You can use regular or elephant garlic, peeled or unpeeled. I’d recommend against frozen, but it’ll do in a pinch.
If the garlic is relatively fresh, you can use it as is. But if the stem end is really woody, or it has started to germinate, you should remove the end and the germ. The germ adds a bitterness to your finished toum. Just slice each clove in half and remove the green bits. I said this recipe was easy, but it can still be tedious!
Strength #
The reason for the difference in strength is that garlic doesn’t produce the strongest burn if cut while in an acid. So pre-processing the garlic before adding the lemon gives a stronger garlic bite. This is especially great with charcoal/wood-fired foods.
Oil #
Don’t use olive oil as your main oil, it will turn a little bitter from the processing. If you want the flavor of olive oil, leave out a portion of your neutral oil and mix in the oilve oil at the end with a whisk.
You can also use flavored oils here. I make a fresh garlic oil using the green parts of fresh garlic bulbs, and it works great in this application.