monkeys and ponies

So, it's pretty warm here today -- about 85°F/30°C -- and I had already planned to grill lamb, because last week I picked up 15+ pounds of lamb as part of a lamb share from a local butcher. Grilled lamb, tzatziki, naan, cucumber salad. Easy.

But in my brain's never-ending quest to make life harder for itself, it went, hey, what if we make toum, a Lebanese garlic sauce, instead of tzatziki? The yogurt will keep, after all, and then all the cucumber can go in the salad.

I look at the toum recipe. It makes a quart. There are two of us. I immediately decide to make no more than half the recipe and ideally a quarter of it. I note that one commenter asks if they can reduce the recipe quantity and never gets a response. No problem; I mean, I have a sneaking suspicion that reducing this to 1/4 means I should use the mortar and pestle method rather than the food processor, but eh, I can put the food processor in the dishwasher but not the mortar and pestle, and apparently I am lazy about hand-washing while still being ambitious about food.

The reduced recipe is going great in the food processor until I start to add the oil, at which point it becomes blatantly obvious I do not have the minimum amount of ingredients in the food processor for the blade to form an emulsion, and I end up with a soupy, oily mess.

But! Serious Eats has a cure for broken emulsions: a single egg white whipped into part of the mixture, then added to the full mixture! For those of you who've made mayonnaise before, this method will sound familiar, except that there you typically work with an egg yolk.

Okay, new problem: 1/4 of the recipe means using only 1/4 of the egg white, which means some annoying measuring. But hey, like I said, this is basically the mayo fix method, and the roughly 3/4C of incredibly garlicky oil I have coincidentally is about the maximum a single egg yolk mayo can absorb, which I know from years of making mayo. I whip up an egg yolk, slowly add the broken emulsion, and next thing you know, I have aioli.

Which tastes harsh to me, because a full extra-virgin olive oil mayo always tastes harsh to me. NO PROBLEM, dammit, I have come this far, and I am not giving up now.

Things that would make this taste less harsh: some of the Greek yogurt I had for the tzatziki I obviously should have stuck with. I added about a third of the cup, some paprika, a bit more salt and pepper ... and, well, hell if I know what I have now, but it tastes really good and it's going on dinner tonight.

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