Garlic Sauce with Olive Oil and Lemon Juice

Preparation

1. At home, garlic sauce can be made with a hand immersion blender or by pounding the ingredients in a mortar. For grinding and mixing, take a tall glass that will fit the blender’s chopper, or a ceramic bowl with high sloping sides. The process is quite fast, so it is worth getting everything ready first so you aren’t distracted later. Take the eggs out of the fridge in advance so they are at room temperature.

2. Peel the required number of garlic cloves. You can use “old” or young garlic, whatever you have.

3. If the garlic is from last year, cut each clove in half and remove the inner sprout, which is tough and greenish. Young garlic cloves can be used whole.

   

4. Separate the egg whites from the yolks. The whites can be used for meringue or added to a poulard omelet. Squeeze the lemon juice.

   

Making the sauce

1. Put the yolks in the glass and add salt. Salt it well, since the total volume of the sauce will be about 1 cup.

2. Add the peeled garlic cloves to the yolks. Pour in 1 tbsp of lemon juice.

   More lemon juice will be added at the final stage, and in the end there may be quite a lot of it, which will only make the garlic sauce tastier.

   

3. Blend the yolks with the garlic until the mixture is “fine” and smooth, with no bits of garlic.

   You may even want to strain the mixture to remove the pieces, because however hard you try, there will be some. You can increase or reduce the amount of garlic to your taste. Sometimes white pepper is added to such sauces, as it doesn’t show up as dark specks.

   

4. Without switching off the blender, add the olive oil in small portions: first a few drops at a time, then 1 tsp at a time. Once the sauce looks like thick sour cream, there is enough oil.

   Any mayonnaise or aioli is an emulsion of liquid and oil: as you whisk, the water and oil combine into one whole and do not separate. It is hard to guess the amount of oil in advance, so go by the thickness. Olive oil can be replaced with sunflower oil, although the taste of the sauce will be slightly different.

   

5. Add another 1 tbsp of lemon juice to the sauce, or more to your taste, and whisk again. The garlic sauce will become thinner, closer to store-bought mayonnaise. After that it is completely ready.

   It doesn’t run, but it is very soft and delicate, and easy to spoon into a sauce boat. Whether it can be kept in the fridge, I don’t know, I haven’t tried: I always make it for a single meal.

   

Serving

1. The sauce is quick to make: while the potatoes bake, make the sauce.

2. To my taste, this sauce is perfect with country-style potato wedges. They make a very tasty side dish on their own, and with this sauce they are a real treat. Arrange everything on a plate, set out the sauce boat and serve.

   It is a special pleasure to pick up a potato wedge with your fingers and dip it in the sauce, no cutlery needed. Still, you can serve a small sauce spoon.

   

3. Also serve the sauce with fish, with bruschetta (it is simply incredible), with grilled meat, or with eggs Benedict.

   It should be said that the sauce is quite high in calories, since the yolks and olive oil make up most of it. To cut the calories, you can skip the oil and add a hard-boiled yolk or a whole hard-boiled egg to the sauce, but that is already a different sauce.