Toum Raider: The Quest For Garlic Sauce

After 20 years, I finally figured out toum.

It was about 24 years ago that I tried toum for the first time. Back then I knew it only as “garlic sauce,” and I thought it had been invented by local LA chain Zankou Chicken.

I was a production assistant on the wonderful but forgotten sitcom Andy RIchter Controls the Universe, and a fellow PA encouraged me to get the chicken plate at Zankou. It was, I had been told, essentially a delivery vessel for the heavenly garlic sauce.

But was it a sauce? A paste? A bastard aioli? I wasn’t sure what to make of the pillowy, white stuff, but I knew after the first bite that I loved it. Lemony, garlicky, and utterly irresistible, the Zankou garlic sauce occupied a large space in my mind. Rumors swirled that the secret ingredient was potato, which was shocking to me, but also just added to the allure.

As I grew older, I learned that Zankou did not, in fact, invent the garlic sauce. I discovered that it was called toum, it was Lebanese, and it was readily available at many Middle Eastern groceries. Nowadays it’s even front and center at Trader Joe’s.

Unsurprisingly, I attempted to make toum at home many years ago, and it was an unmitigated failure. First time I “made” it, I just wound up whipping around a broken mess in my blender. My memory is that there were little bits of garlic everywhere and nothing resembling a sauce in sight.

Not long after that, in 2013, I documented my next toum adventure on my old blog (where embarrassingly I used basically the same headline as I have for this post. And yes, I may be recycling a pun, but after 12 years, I’m allowed). That attempt called for an egg white, which was interesting, but the final product landed more in the aioli camp than anything else. My memory is that, despite nice flavor, it simply was not garlicky enough.

People think a garlic aioli is garlicky - and it is! - but compared to toum, it pales immensely. It’s like comparing a bourbon glaze to Buffalo Trace served neat. At the end of my blog post, I promised “If I find the proper ratio of lemon juice and garlic, I will undoubtedly report back to the blog.”

I never reported back.

But also, I moved on to other experiments and escapades. Now, twelve years later, I’m here on this humble Substack to report that I have finally conquered toum.

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I’m currently in the middle of a 3 week span of intense travel, which means a lot of time in airports, on planes, and in hotel rooms. My intake of Starbucks breakfast sandwiches has spiked, as has a wide variety of not-very-good-for-me culinary choices. With a few days home last week, I promised myself that I would cook myself something healthy. The pivot, I concluded, would come in the form of portobello mushrooms.

So I hatched a game plan. I would slather some ‘bellos in oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, and while they marinated, I would think of a fun sauce. This felt like a good excuse to dive into Kismet cookbook, a promising volume that I hadn’t even touched since I’d bought it six months ago. In its pages I found not only an appealing recipe for toum, but one for zhoug, an herby Yemeni condiment. Which to make? How about both!

Intriguingly, the Kismet toum recipe calls for instant potato flakes, which I was not opposed to at all, but the idea of cluttering my pantry with a box of potato flakes was not incredibly appealing. For one dreaded moment, I contemplated canceling the toum. Luckily, I’d recently purchased the Lebanese cookbook Keep It Zesty, in which author Edy Massih features a potato-flake-free toum recipe. Glorious! Now I could sample two cookbooks in the pursuit of mushroom healthfulness.

The zhoug turned out great - nothing to report there. A lot of herbs, chiles, and spices came together for a bright, zingy condiment that I’ve since been spooning onto all sorts of unsuspecting items. But I’m here to talk toum.

For this recipe, I needed to use a full cup of garlic cloves, which is a massive uptick from the five cloves I used in my 2013 attempt. If you plan on tumbling down this path too, buy peeled garlic because a cup of cloves is way more than you may realize. You don’t want to be stuck fumbling with all those sticky garlic papers getting everywhere — truly my greatest annoyance in the kitchen.

The recipe also calls for lemon juice, salt, vegetable oil, extra virgin olive oil, and ice. That’s it! But do note that it’s a lot of oil (over two cups, combined); so double check your supply before you start. I just want you to be ready — emotionally and otherwise.

From a birds eye view, this is a straightforward experience: we’re just blending a few ingredients in a food processor. But it’s never that easy, is it? This is a precision game, and Edy stresses careful attention to quantities, lest the entire emulsion break. He encourages using a kitchen scale for peak accuracy and emphasizes the importance of cold ice water. There’s a lot of add this, then this, then half of that, then some tablespoons of this, and then the last half of that. None of it is hard, but it does require focus. You can’t just dump everything in the processor and go nuts. Things need to be sequenced, slowly and methodically.

I had such a deep fear of breaking my emulsion that I maintained the slowest oil drizzle known to humanity. And let me repeat: there was a LOT of oil to pour. I felt like I was standing there for at least four days, if not six. Needless to say, the drizzling took way longer than I had expected.

Notably, there are some on the internets who say doing this process with an immersion blender and a narrow cup fast-forwards the entire emulsion ordeal, but I’ve decided it’s more fun to do it the long, slow way. It unquestionably made me tougher as a human and more noble as a home cook.

Thanks to my prudent and glacial drizzling, my toum never broke. The final product was fluffy and tall - like an ethereal batch of mashed potatoes. It made so much that I filled almost an entire 32 oz mason jar of toum. A true testament to the powers of emulsifying!

But was this just another failure in my decades-long quest for homemade toum?? Of course not! When the amount of garlic you process is larger than a human fist, you’re going to hit peak toum flavor. And that’s what happened here. This was not another aioli masquerading as toum. This was real deal toum goodness, with all the texture and flavor I’d enjoyed at Zankou Chicken as well as many fine establishments over the years.

Edy warns that fresh toum will pack a potent wallop before mellowing out in the fridge, and I can confirm that this was the toum’s journey. That first night was pretty insane — not that it stopped me at all from consuming large quantities. There would be no vampires knocking at the door. But also — vampires, grow up. It’s just garlic.

Anyway, the toum was a success. The zhoug was a success. The stage was set for a very cute vegetarian dinner.

First I made a little bed of zhoug on a plate, creating a vibrant green foundation for subsequent additions. For those who are bed-curious, it’s a simple method: plop two or three spoonfuls of sauce in the middle of a plate and then, with the back of said spoon, make an increasingly wide spiral out from the center. You’ll have so much fun.

Hot bed-on-bed action.

Clearly I was in a bed frenzy because I then topped the zhoug with a secondary bed of toum and finally my beautiful portobellos. Oh! And I almost forgot! While the mushrooms were cooking, I toasted some pistachios in a small skillet along with a few splashes of vinegar. I think? I honestly forget what I did to those nuts. I’m pretty sure it was vinegar. Was there honey too? Who knows.

The point is that I did something FABULOUS to the pistachios, and you’ll just have to take my word for it. Anyway, I garnished the plate with parsley and mystery pistachios for what turned out to be a very photogenic midweek vegetarian meal.

This was a great use of all items. The bright intensity of the zhoug and toum was nicely counterbalanced by the mushrooms’ meatiness. No surprise here, given that both condiments are often within arms’ length from many Middle Eastern meats. Pistachios provided necessary crunch and the parsley kept things fresh in typical herby fashion. Maybe some of the seasoning was a little off? I was perhaps a little heavy-handed with salting the portobellos. They would have been perfect in another dish, but paired with the two condiments and the salty pistachios, it was a bit much.

Whatever. It was all delicious. And the toum - a dream! In the days since this meal, the toum has indeed mellowed out, which means I no longer have to fear going out in public after consuming it. I also don’t have to ration it out carefully since I have a ludicrous amount in my fridge.

I’ve spread the toum on pita chips for a simple snack; I’ve added it to turkey sandwiches (FUN); and I’ve even dolloped it into a subpar pad thai to help spruce it up. And for those wondering, no, toum and pad thai are not a match made in heaven. They play together nicely enough, but pad thai is so limey and toum is so lemony. This was not a Sprite moment. However, it got me wondering what toum would taste like with lime juice instead of lemon. HMMMM.

It took many years — although, it really was just about three attempts total, if I’m being honest - but I finally made a successful homemade toum. Excited to do it again, and I’m looking forward toum many more garlicky evenings [rimshot!]. See below for the recipe.

Have you ever made toum? And how have you used it?

Edy Massih’s Toum

Adapted from Keep It Zesty.

Makes 3 cups. Use weighted measurements if possible.

Ingredients:

130 grams garlic cloves (1 cup)

1 tablespoon kosher salt

60 grams fresh lemon juice (¼ cup)

300 grams vegetable oil (1½ cups)

200 grams extra-virgin

Olive oil (¾ cup)

60 grams ice water (¼ cup)

The Method:

1. Add the garlic and salt to a food processor. Pulse about 6 times, stopping to scrape the sides as needed, until the garlic is minced. Add 1 tablespoon of the lemon juice and process for about 30 seconds, until a rough paste forms. Add another 1 tablespoon lemon juice and process for about 45 seconds, until smooth.

2. With the processor running, slowly drizzle in ½ cup of the vegetable oil and another 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Continue alternating until both are incorporated. Drizzle in 1 tablespoon of the ice water, then ¼ cup of the olive oil, and continue the alternating pattern until both are incorporated. Transfer to an airtight container and refrigerate for up to 2 months.