How do I make aioli or garlic mayonnaise?

Two different things share the name. In Provence and Catalonia, aioli is garlic pounded with salt in a mortar and then taken up with oil, held together by the garlic's own mucilage — no egg, and it is genuinely difficult. Everywhere else, including nearly every UK restaurant menu, aioli means mayonnaise with garlic in it. Both are worth knowing, and the second one is what most people are actually looking for.

Safety

What you'll need

• Garlic
• Egg yolk (optional)
• Neutral oil, or a mild olive oil
• Coarse salt
• Mortar and pestle (optional)
• Lemon

Step by step

1. Decide which one you are making.Egg-free aioli is a mortar job, takes twenty minutes of grinding, and breaks easily. Garlic mayonnaise is mayonnaise with garlic and is reliable. For a dip, a burger or fish, garlic mayonnaise is the right answer.
2. Reduce the garlic to a smooth paste with salt before it goes anywhere near the sauce.Crush the clove, sprinkle over a good pinch of coarse salt, and work it against the board with the flat of a knife until it is a wet paste with no fragments. Salt acts as an abrasive. Chopped garlic gives you hot bits and an uneven sauce.
3. Use one small clove per egg yolk to start with.Raw garlic is far stronger than it seems while you are tasting an unfinished sauce, and it strengthens as the mayonnaise sits. You can always mash in more; you cannot take it out.
4. Whisk the garlic paste into the yolk with mustard, lemon juice and salt.Lemon rather than vinegar suits garlic better. A teaspoon of Dijon adds stability. Whisk until pale.
5. Add the oil drop by drop until it thickens, then in a thread, then in spoonfuls.Exactly as for plain mayonnaise. Around 200ml of oil per yolk. Use a neutral oil or cut olive oil with neutral — whisked extra virgin turns bitter and garlic already brings plenty of aggression.
6. Rest it for twenty minutes, then taste and adjust.Garlic keeps developing. Taste after it has sat, and correct with lemon and salt at that point rather than immediately after making it.

Tips

• Remove the green germ from the middle of an older clove. It is noticeably more bitter and more acrid than the rest.
• Garlic mayonnaise made with a blender is often harsher than one made by hand — the blades shred the garlic and release more of the pungent compounds.
• If it has gone too garlicky, whisk in more plain mayonnaise. There is no other fix.
• A spoonful of the sauce stirred into a fish soup or spread on toast for a fish stew is the classic use, and it is very good with cold roast chicken.

Alternatives

• True egg-free aioli: Pound four cloves and coarse salt in a mortar to a completely smooth paste, then add olive oil literally drop by drop while grinding in one direction, for fifteen to twenty minutes. It emulsifies on the garlic alone. It splits readily and cannot be rescued the usual way.
• Roasted garlic mayonnaise: Squeeze the flesh from a head of roasted garlic and mash it into finished mayonnaise. Sweet, mellow, no harshness, and it does not turn acrid on standing. A better sauce for most purposes than the raw version, if not a traditional one.
• Confit garlic version: Garlic cloves cooked slowly in oil until soft, then mashed in. Similar to roasted but with a cleaner flavour. Keep the oil and the cloves refrigerated and use within a week — garlic in oil at room temperature is a genuine botulism risk.
• Shortcut with shop mayonnaise: Good bought mayonnaise plus garlic paste, lemon and a little olive oil stirred in is a perfectly respectable sauce, keeps far longer, and carries no raw egg question at all.

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