This is a garlicy mayonnaise they might call aioli in France. It is chiefly emulsified with egg yolk.
This they might call alioli in Spain, or I've seen a few different spellings for it. It has
no egg in it at all. It's just garlic, salt and olive oil, and yet it is still pretty thick and
creamy. In Lebanon, they'd call this toum. It's just garlic, salt, oil, and lemon juice, no egg
at all, and yet it is so thick you could mortar bricks with it. You could build a whole house,
which is good because after you eat something so insanely garlicy, you're probably going to
get kicked out of wherever you live now. Both toum here and "authentic" Spanish aioli
are made possible by the surprisingly strong emulsifying power of garlic itself. What's also
surprising is how poorly that power is understood presently by scientists. I'm going to show you the
one single study I've found that investigates these properties of garlic in any depth.
I'm going to show you how to make all three of these delicious sauces, or dips or spreads
or whatever you want to call them. First let's remind ourselves what an
emulsifier even is. An emulsifier is some kind of molecule that can bond with two liquids that don't
normally mix, like oil and water. Oil and water naturally separate. The emulsifier has one part
of its surface that is lipophilic, it bonds with the oil, and it has another part of its surface
that is hydrophilic, it bonds with water. Thus, the water, the oil and the protein or whatever
it is in the middle, they all come together into one giant complex. These complexes rub
up against each other in ways that dramatically increase the viscosity of the overall liquid.
The emulsion is far more thick and creamy than any of its constituent liquids are on their own.
When I first heard about authentic Spanish aioli or whatever you call the stuff that doesn't have
any egg in it, I was skeptical that this really is an emulsion. You don't have to have an emulsion
in order to have a thick liquid that can hold water and oil inside itself. Take, for example,
a gravy. Gravy is a meaty, water-based sauce thickened with starch — at least that's what
a gravy usually is here in the United States. And a really thick gravy can hold a surprising
amount of fat inside it, even though the starch molecules are not bonding the water in the fat
together. The starch is simply making the sauce so darn thick and viscus that the fat droplets are
trapped like a guy drowning in a swamp. It's so thick that the fat droplets couldn't float to the
surface if they wanted to, and they do want to. In this case, I suppose the gravy is a colloidal
suspension, but not the specific kind of colloidal suspension we call an emulsion. A gravy thickened
with starch will tend to separate in time. It's not terribly stable as it sits around,
unless you make it incredibly thick, like thick with three Cs instead of the normal
two. So I walked into the kitchen to make no-egg Spanish aioli with the intention of debunking this
whole emulsion thing. I figured this is probably a situation where the oil is just being thickened by
the vegetable fibers in the garlic, kind of like tomato sauce. Tomato sauce is thick, even though
it's not an emulsion and it doesn't have any starch thickening it up. It's thick chiefly
because it's full of pulverized vegetable matter — cellulose, other kinds of fiber and the like.
I figured traditional aioli must be the same deal. Traditionally, you throw in some coarse salt to
act as an abrasive and you mash the garlic into a paste with a mortar and pestle. Then you gradually
mix in the oil. At first, yeah, it just looks like oil swimming around in a bunch of vegetable
matter. It's thick because it's a paste of fiber. But if that were all that was going on, then the
sauce should get thinner as we add more oil to it, right? As we add more oil to it and we dilute all
of that vegetable fiber in there, eventually it's going to start to just have the consistency of
oil, because it'll be mostly oil in there. But as you can see, that is not what is happening
at all. I add more oil, the sauce actually gets thicker, and it starts to get that
glossy gelatinous look of mayonnaise. I remind you, there is no egg in here. It's just oil,
garlic and salt. The only explanation for what we see happening is that something in the garlic
is forming an emulsion between the water in the garlic and the oil we're mixing in. That's why the
addition of a thin substance, oil, makes the sauce thicker, counterintuitively. Only up to a point,
though. Eventually all of the emulsifying molecules we have available from the garlic,
they'll all get used up. You can totally see it happening. You stir in some oil and you see it
forming distinct streaks in the mixture. The oil doesn't simply disappear like it did before. Now
the sauce is getting looser and looser the more oil I put into it. All of the emulsified droplets
are just swimming around in a sea of plain old oil and the sauce gets thinner and thinner.
I did a number of experiments where I weighed my garlic and my oil, and I could never get
more than one part of garlic to emulsify more than three parts of oil by weight.
One to three. The result is an astoundingly garlicy sauce — burn-your-tongue-off levels
of raw garlic. Gradually it'll mellow out a little bit. That spicy allicin compound that is made by
crushing the garlic — that breaks down in about a day at room temperature. That's why prepackaged
garlic puree isn't terribly pungent. You can see why people started to reach for
a supplemental emulsifier like egg. No matter how much that eggless sauce sits around, it's
still going to be really strong by the time you eat it. Plus, it's not super stable and it takes
a lot of strength to do the traditional way in the mortar and pestle. Fortunately,
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your first month of Future. Thank you, Future. Anyway, the traditional aioli made with just
garlic, salt, and oil. It's pretty labor intensive to make,
it's not terribly stable and it is so pungently garlicy that it could jeopardize a marriage. Not
surprisingly, somebody somewhere got the idea of supplementing the garlic emulsifier with egg yolk,
a far more powerful emulsifier, which means you can use less garlic. That's maybe two teaspoons
of chopped garlic ground down with salt and here comes the yolk, which is full of certain proteins
that bond oil and water, also lecithin, which is a phospholipid, a very powerful emulsifier.
Some people put a little lemon juice or vinegar into this kind of aioli, which may or may not
have originated in Southern France, Provence. It could have also come from Spain where some
people call it ajonesa, and they often seem to use the whole egg, not just the yolk.
Start drizzling in the oil nice and slow, like you do with any emulsion. Hey, why do you have
to go slow as you work in the oil? It's kind of complicated, but one reason is you need to
break the oil down into tiny droplets that can be coated by the emulsifier. If you were to just
flood the egg yolk with a ton of oil right off the bat, there's not enough non-oil stuff in here to
get between the oil and divide it up into tiny droplets. It's like trying to wrap 20 packages
with one little scrap of wrapping paper. In that analogy, the sticky tape is the emulsifier.
You only need a few little bits of tape to wrap 20 packages, but you need a lot of wrapping paper.
The wrapping paper is the water and all the other stuff in the egg that can get between the oil and
divide it up into tiny droplets. There just isn't enough other stuff in here, so this emulsion will
never form, no matter how much I whisk it. But if I go nice and slow from the beginning,
the oil gets cut up into tiny droplets. Those droplets link up with an emulsifier and they
become a different substance, for all intents and purposes. This is not a bowl full of oil
now. It's a bowl full of emulsified oil, which is a different substance, which means I can start
pouring the oil in a lot faster. There's plenty of other stuff in here now to get between the oil
and divide it into droplets. Note that the aioli is getting stiffer and stiffer as I add in more
thin oil. You can add a thin liquid and it makes your stuff thicker, not thinner — that's how you
know you have a real emulsion going. And one egg yolk can emulsify an astounding amount of oil.
Like we said, one part garlic can emulsify three parts oil, according to my experiments.
One part egg yolk can emulsify well over a hundred parts of oil, maybe 150. It's insane.
So basically you just stop whenever you have as much mayonnaise as you want. Yes, this so-called
aioli is really just garlic-flavored mayonnaise. Indeed, here in the US, we tend to refer to
any flavored mayonnaise these days as being some kind of aioli. Yes, this does also include
raw egg. If that's a problem, if you need to be really safe with your food, in terms of food-borne
illness, use pasteurized egg. I won't lie — I love the custardy texture you get from the egg.
I liked that we didn't have to use a totally overwhelming amount of garlic relative to the oil,
and I like the zing from the lemon juice. But of course we could make "real" aioli with
lemon juice. A few garlic cloves ground down with salt, slowly mix in the juice from half
a lemon and then slowly mix in the oil, for all of the reasons we said before to go slowly. It's
interesting, I was able to emulsify nearly twice as much oil into the garlic this time with the
addition of the lemon juice. I suppose you need both oil and water to form an emulsion and there's
just not that much water inside a garlic clove, so the extra water from the lemon helps. Acidity
helps emulsions too, up to a point. You can see why this is a traditional sauce/spread as well in
Lebanon. We've just made toum, though the modern recipes I see for it today use a food processor.
I've got about 150 grams of garlic here. Yes, I caved and I bought pre-peeled.
Maybe two teaspoons of salt. Blast that until it's finally minced. Get my emulsion started by
drizzling in some oil. I'm using a refined oil this time — peanut oil instead of extra virgin
olive oil. Most recipes for toum I've read tell you to use a more neutral oil for some
or all of the fat in here. Indeed, a grassy and somewhat bitter virgin oil can be a lot
to take in with the garlic and everything else. Scrape down the bowl every now and then. I can
also start integrating my lemon juice. I'm doing two lemons for this much garlic.
You also need to be careful about adding too much of your water-based liquid at once.
If you flood your emulsifiers in water, then you simply reduce the odds of oil droplets being able
to come into contact with those lipophilic sites. So it pays to add everything kind of gradually,
at least at first. Once you've got it going, you can just dump everything in. I did
four or five parts oil to one part garlic by weight. That's a common ratio for toum,
based on the recipes that I have read. Check this stuff out — so thick and so white. Yeah, that's
because we used refined oil and no egg yolk, but also I think because we used the food processor
and the food processor worked a lot of air into it. It's fluffy, and that's why it's white. Yeah,
it's still overpoweringly gar... oo, bye. It's still overpoweringly garlicy, but I've read
about people keeping this in the fridge sealed for weeks or months even. I don't know if that's safe,
but people do it. And then you use it as a spread, and I'm sure the flavor calms down over time.
Hey, so why exactly does garlic work as an emulsifier? Well,
that's what these researchers from Spain and New Zealand tried to figure out in 2018.
They noted a total lack of research into what they called the functional properties of garlic:
"emulsification, foaming, gelling, etc." So they did the foundational research and they identified
at least three different types of emulsifiers in garlic: certain proteins or peptides, which
are parts of proteins; fructans, which are big polymers of the sugar fructose, and some people
are digestively intolerant of those; the third one is the most interesting to me — saponins.
Saponins are named after soap. Saponins are these compounds that kind of foam up in water,
and this is just pure speculation on my part, but maybe it's the saponins in the garlic that cause
this toum here to take on so much more air than mayonnaise does in the blender. The other fun fact
about saponins is they're usually poisonous in very large quantities, and indigenous peoples all
over the world still use plants rich in saponins to poison fish out of the water. It's a means
of catching fish to eat. You poison them in the water. But that's a subject for another day.