Roasted Garlic Aioli and Studies

A few days ago, I mentioned that Jason, who writes the Windy City Cooking column, had sent me a copy of Tom Colicchio's book, Think Like a Chef. I'm about halfway through so far, and it's a pleasure to read. Colicchio's writing style is friendly and laid-back, and his instructions are easy to follow. Although I didn't use his recipe when I made roasted garlic the other night, I have been really enjoying the book. The most interesting section so far is called Studies, and in it Colicchio shows how he selects one vegetable and then thinks about all the different directions it could go in. With a single tomato comes a roasted tomato, which becomes a key part of a number of dishes that follow. The way in which he thinks about food is useful and worthwhile, and so for today's post, and a future post, I'm going to attempt to carry out the same kind of thinking, in this case applied to garlic. We already have roasted garlic, which was the subject of last night's Midnight Snack post, and today we're going to tackle aioli.

For this roasted garlic aioli, I used a combination of two recipes, one from Serious Eats, and one from Epicurious. Both are recipes for aiolis that use raw garlic, but I suspected roasted garlic would work at least as well, if not better. The Serious Eats recipe is for a chili aioli, and we'll look at how to make that variation at the end of this post.



First, you'll need a single egg yolk, 1/4 tsp Dijon (or any) mustard (whatever you have on hand is great), 1 tsp vinegar, a large pinch of salt, and 2 tsp fresh lemon juice. Then just whisk those together.



Start adding a mixture of vegetable and olive oils (half of each), about a 1/4 tsp at a time. Whisk nonstop throughout this process, and keep at it until you've added a little over 1/2 cup of oil. This is a picture about 1/3 of the way into the process.



And here's the completed mixture. Leave it to set in the fridge for a while so the flavors can blend together.





After at least an hour, take your mixture out of the fridge, and toss in a large clove of roasted garlic. I actually ended up using two cloves, which gave the aioli a very garlicky flavor, as opposed to a moderate one. Either way, the roasted garlic imparts a really nice flavor to it.





If you'd like to make this into chili aioli, just add a little Sriracha and whisk it in. I removed about half of the roasted garlic aioli from the mixing bowl and put it in the fridge so I could have a little of each variety. You can use your aioli in a variety of ways, one of which is as a sandwich spread, and another of which I'll tackle in a future post.



Thanks for stopping by Beach City Cooking, and I'll see you all very soon for another post. Have a great night, and stay cool!