Toum

A garlic lover’s dream, toum is a thick and fluffy Lebanese sauce that’s popular throughout the Middle East. It’s often paired with roasted and grilled meats such as shawarma and kebabs, but it’s also delicious spread in sandwiches and served as a dip for vegetables and even French fries. Made with just a few simple ingredients – garlic, oil, lemon juice and salt – this vegan sauce doesn’t need eggs to become emulsified and creamy, thanks to the natural emulsifiers found in garlic. Traditionally toum is made with a mortar and pestle, but this recipe uses the convenience of a food processor to whip up a big batch of toum. You could also use a blender or immersion blender with some caveats: the sauce will come out thinner in a regular blender and not all immersion blenders are strong enough to emulsify the sauce. While we love the garlicky punch of toum (toum means garlic in Arabic after all), we found in testing that it was sometimes overwhelmed by harsh spicy, bitter notes, depending on the age of the garlic. Removing the small, green sprout from the cloves helps but isn’t always enough. We tried different methods to mellow the spiciness (soaking the garlic in ice water, blanching the garlic, etc.) but found that they either had no effect, diluted the garlic flavor or eliminated the garlic’s emulsifying properties. We finally settled on letting the garlic sit in lemon juice for a short while before adding the oil, which is a technique we often use for salad dressings or other raw sauces. This tones down some of the bitterness and spiciness without taking away any of the garlicky flavor.