Toum

One of my favorite local businesses to support is a Mediterranean eatery that serves up some really delicious fire-roasted kebabs. The best thing they make is what they call "marina bread" which I tried googling and nothing really comes up so it must be a colloquial name that the restauranteurs have given this deliciously simple pita filled with a spicy tomato sauce and onions, toasted together into a tasty little package.

I'm going to try and make marina bread on my own at some point, but today's is inspired by one of the little tubs of sauces that accompanies their kebab platters: toum. There's always a little tub of spicy tomato sauce (their version of hot sauce), tahini, and toum. Toum is a mediterranean sauce that's basically like mayonnaise but made from garlic instead of egg. I'm not quite sure how garlic manages to aid in the emulsification of the oil, but it works and it's delicious. It can be rather pungent, though that pungency reduces with time, but most recipes seem to call for just pure garlic and I find that it's not really palatable to be eaten immediately. So, in my version, I like to roast some of the garlic, which helps to bring out some of the inherent sweetness and also mellows out the flavor of the sauce quite a bit.

Ingredients:
8 to 10 cloves garlic
¼ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 to 1½ cups canola oil

Start by smashing half of the cloves of garlic and tossing into a small saucepan with ¼ cup of oil. Slowly heat up over low just until the cloves are softened and fragrant. The goal is to cook them through but you're not looking to get any color on them. At the same time, the garlic is imparting its flavor into the oil. Set aside and let it cool completely.

Fish the garlic out of the oil and add to a food processor. Toss in the other raw cloves, a sprinkle of salt, and a squeeze of lemon juice and pulse until the garlic is completely pureed into a fine paste.

Slowly drizzle in the oil (start with the garlic-infused oil and then start drizzling in the rest of the plain oil; it'll be 1 to 1½ cups total added in the end) until you end up with a thick, creamy, white, spreadable sauce (like mayo). Give it a taste for seasoning, add more salt or lemon as you feel is necessary, and that's it. That's the sauce; done.

I made this toum to accompany chicken souvlaki flatbread pitas but I made the sauce first just so it could have some time to mellow out and develop flavors.

The thing I love most about Mediterranean food is how simple it is - always just a few ingredients: something herbaceous like parsley, something bright like lemon, lots of vegetables - and how fun it is to prepare.

The toum made for a delicious addition to this table. It added a richness and unctuousness that cannot quite be accomplished by just the tzatziki and feta crumbles alone. We didn't finish all of it in one go, but no worries as it keeps well in the fridge (at least a few weeks). And like I mentioned, it actually mellows out more with time so it probably hits its peak (in my opinion) after a week.

Here's the recipe page: