Lebanese Garlic Sauce

Some good friends of ours are Lebanese. I find the Lebanese cooking, not surprisingly, very similar to Turkish.  One thing we both seem to love is lots of garlic!

Here's a great recipe from Mediterranean Diet Cookbook: A Delicious Alternative for Lifelong Health by Nancy Harmon Jenkins -- a fabulous cookbook!

This garlic sauce, toum bi zeit or garlic with oil, is a Lebanese version of aioli minus the eggs. Zahle, a town on the Damascus Road at the edge of the great central Beqaa Valley of Lebanon, was once famous for the quality of its grilled chcken. Travelers en route to Damascus or to the impressive Roman ruins at Baalbek always scheduled a stop at a roadside restaurant in Zahle for grilled or roasted chicken served with toum bi zeit. This is also a critical ingredient in my favorite Beirut street food, a humble chicken sandwich made on small loaves of French bread and glorified with a thick smear of toum bi zeit. It is as delicious with grilled, poached, or roasted fish as it is with chicken.

This is for people who truly adore garlic.

Ingredients:

• 6 garlic cloves, coarsely choppd
  
• 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
  
• 1 1-inch slice of counry-style bread (whole-grain), crusts removed
  
• 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
  
• 3 tablespoons boiling water
  
• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

Directions: Using a mortar and pestle, crush the garlic with the salt until you have a very smooth paste. Tear the bread into chunks and place them in a bowl. Cover with warm water, then squeeze the bread as dry as you can. Add the bread to the garlic, a little at a time, and continue pounding to get a smooth paste. Now, using the pestle, stir in the olive oil, 1 tablespoon after another, and then the boiling water, 1 tablespoon after another. Stir in the lemon juice. You should have a smooth, thick paste. Serve in a bowl to accompany chicken, fish, or steamed vegetables. Makes 1/2 cup, enough for 8 servings

Garlic Mayonnaise

This is not my recipe, nor is it Turkish, but is one I find quite wonderful. It is from Mediterranean Diet Cookbook: A Delicious Alternative for Lifelong Health by Nancy Harmon Jenkins.

Aiolo, sometimes called the "butter of Provence" because it is so integral to the cuisine, is simply a mayonaise incorporating quantities of fresh garlic--usually two cloves per person in Provence. That is a lot, and you might wish to use less (I do--three or four cloves for this recipe), but since the whole point of aioli is garlic, by all means don't stint. The quality of the garlic is most important--it should be fresh and plump with swollen cloves. Reject any shriveled cloves or any in which the core is developing a green sprout.

Traditionally aioli is made with egg yolks and garlic pounded in a mortar. A lighter sauce can be made in the blender with a whole egg and an egg white, but the blender does odd things to the taste of garlic, so I prefer to make the lighter mayonaise in the blender, then fold the garlic paste in separately by hand. I always use organic eggs, but if you're not sure of your egg source and worried about salmonella, don't try this recipe.

Ingredients:

1 whole egg
1 egg white
salt to taste
1 to 1 1/2 cups fruity extra-virgin olive oil as needed
juice of 1/2 lemon or more to taste
4 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped

Directions:

Make the mayonnaise by whirling the egg and egg white in a blender with a little pinch of salt. Remove the center knob from the blender lid and, with the blender churning, start to pour in the olive oil, a very thin thread at first, until the mixture starts to thicken. Stop the blender and pour in a few tablespoons of lemon juice, then start the blender again and continue adding oil, a little more thickly as the mixture emulsifies and mounts. When all the oil has been added, turn the blender off and set aside.

Combine the garlic in a small bowl or a mortar with a teaspoon of salt and pound the garlc or crush it with the back of a spoon until you have a thick and homogeneous paste. Now use a spatula to scrape the mayonnaise into the garlic paste and turn gently to incorporate everything. Taste and add more salt and lemon juice if desired.

If the mayonnaise breaks down and separates while you're blending it, remove it all from the blender and start over again with a fresh egg. Whirl the egg until it is light and add, bit by bit, the broken-down mayonnaise and more oil and lemon juce. It should be easy to reconstitute the mayonnaise. Then proceed as directed.

Makes about 1 1/4 cups; 20 servings

Garlic-Yogurt Sauce

Tonight I'll start the recipes out with a double header. First a wonderful Turkish sauce which can be used on many different foods (fried or grilled vegetables, meat balls, pasta), and then one of my favorite vegetables to go with it.

Garlic-Yogurt Sauce is a staple in the Turkish kitchen. And it's wonderful. In order to make good sauce you need good quality yogurt, PLAIN yogurt. Get the best quality yogurt you can afford, or make your own (I'll post directions tomorrow). Also, I highly recommend yogurt from whole milk, not low fat, and definitely not non-fat. If you have concerns about using full-fat milk products, check out one of my links to the right, Eat Fat Lose Fat.

This is one of those recipes that I didn't learn from a cookbook, but rather by cooking around Turks, so I don't have specific measurements.

Ingredients:

• plain yogurt
• garlic
• sea salt

Directions:

For a family of four, I'll usually mix up at least half a quart of yogurt for this sauce. But as the garlic-yogurt sauce keeps well, you could easily mix up a whole quart and keep any leftover in the refrigerator.

Mix the yogurt with a fork or small whip until creamy. Then crush the garlic (2-3 cloves for ½ a quart, but this is to taste) and add to the yogurt. Last, mix in sea salt to taste as well.

That's it. Pretty easy. But it's sooooo good!

Nutritionally, yogurt is a wonderful food. It provides protein and calcium in a very digestible form and is a natural probiotic.

Here's some links for more information on yogurt:
Wikipedia article on yogurt
AboutYogurt.com
article from MedicinalFoodNews.com