Toum (garlic sauce)

This is the delicious garlic sauce that you get at Lebanese restaurants. After having it at lunch one day, I wanted to see what was in it, and discovered it's really very simple - garlic, oil, lemon juice, and salt. Some recipes also included egg whites, but I decided that it would just be a bit safer without worrying about raw egg in the sauce. I followed
http://www.mamaslebanesekitchen.com/dips/lebanese-garlic-dip/ (of course I'm going to trust a Lebanese mama on this one) and that link has a lot of background, chemistry, and videos about making this sauce.

Ingredients:
3 heads of garlic, peeled
4 cups of canola oil
1 lemon, freshly juiced
1 teaspoon of salt

Add the garlic and salt to the food processor. Pulse several times, stopping to scrape down the sides, until it turns pasty and looks crushed. After this, the food processor will stay on until you're done. Add the first 1/2 cup of oil in a thin stream to the running processor. Let this mix for a few seconds and add 1/2 teaspoon of lemon juice. Wait a few seconds until this incorporates and then alternate 1/2 cup oil and 1/2 teaspoon of lemon juice until it's all added. This will take about 10 minutes. (If you go slowly with added the liquids then they should be completely emulsified and the sauce won't separate.)

I used three-and-a-half heads of garlic because a couple of the heads seemed a bit small. I tried peeling the garlic by tossing them around in a container (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d3oc24fD-c) and it did work for most of the cloves, but it took me longer than 10 seconds and there were some that I still had to "manually" peel. I used a plastic container with a twist on lid because 1) I don't think I have two bowls the same size that could easily be held and 2) I'm likely to let go of those bowls in the shaking process and I'd have garlic cloves flying everywhere.

The one lemon gave me about 1/4 cup of juice, and it was in the process of measuring out the oil that I realized how much 4 cups really is and that it's not going to disappear, so I was going to have a lot of garlic sauce to share when I was finished.

Here is the garlic with the salt...

And then pulsed a few times to small bits...

And then to the paste.

After the first 1/2 cup of oil and 1/2 teaspoon of lemon juice it really starts to send the aroma up the chute.

This is about 2 cups of oil.

And this is how full it was when I was done.

It has a texture like mayonnaise, so if you want a bit of a thinner sauce (such as for dipping), just put some in a bowl and slowly add water while you mix.

I needed air-tight containers for the sauce and I wanted glass jars because this sauce is definitely strong enough to make plastic smell forever. I had one ring jar, an old salsa jar, and one from Caesar salad dressing. Pick nicer jars if you're going to gift this :)

My first use was with roasted potatoes, but so far I've had it in biscuits, pasta sauce, and mashed potatoes. Anywhere that you'd use garlic and oil you can use a bit of this sauce. As a dipping sauce I find it has a bit of fresh garlic "bite" at the end, so I think next time I'm going to roast the garlic a bit first to get a sweeter flavour. I'm excited already!

~Lisa