Toum: Lebanese garlic sauce
This Lebanese garlic sauce may look just like your standard garlic sauce, but it is also completely vegan and gluten-free. This sauce is not thickened with egg, but with garlic and lemon juice.
Thanks to lecithin, a substance in garlic that binds the olive oil and lime juice, this sauce becomes just as thick as mayonnaise without using egg. A natural thickening agent, so you don’t need any egg. The lemon juice and water prevent the emulsion from becoming overloaded by all that oil and keep the sauce from splitting.
How to make toum
When making this sauce, pay particular extra attention to the garlic. Choose fresh garlic. Peel it and remove the germ. For a large batch, you will need 130 g garlic, 60 ml lemon juice, 60 ml water, 1 tsp salt and 600 ml neutral oil. Grind all the ingredients except the oil in a mortar or food processor. Keep mixing while pouring in the oil in as thin a stream as possible; otherwise, the sauce will split. Follow this recipe or watch the video below.
Variation tip: fresh mint
If you like, you can also add finely chopped fresh mint. In Lebanon, they eat toum as a dip with fries and spread it on a chicken sandwich. Delicious with mint! You can keep the garlic sauce refrigerated for about a week.
Also read:
