More About Toum

As Pierrette implied, I was making some toum this morning. This isn't the first time, and won't be the last. One of the shwarma places I go to regularly serves a garlic sauce with its shwarmas that is excellent, albeit incredibly strong, so I decided that I needed to learn how.

The first time I tried, I was able to find out that the sauce is called toum, and find a few contradictory recipes. Like many traditional recipes, there are lots of ways to make it, and very few precise instructions. Unfortunately, toum is also a bit of a pain; it's sort of like a garlic and oil emulsion, and so the oil has to be added a bit a time. Meanwhile, garlic is very difficult to macerate in mortar and pestle, although it is doable.

If you're going to try a food processor, make a big batch - a few cloves of garlic is just enough for the food processor to throw around, but not enough to really latch on to, so there's not enough to really kick-start the emulsion with a teaspoon of oil.

Some people add a little mustard powder to help emulsify, others add some egg white to increase the creamy whiteness. I've tried the mustard, but not the egg white. I think that next time I might start by using a garlic press on the garlic to get it smaller with limited effort.

We'll see; when I feel like I've mastered it, perhaps I'll post more tips.

Day 2 of being sick

I am beyond congested and poor little Christophe had such a hard time sleeping last night. I think he wok up at least 10 or 15 times because he was too congested to breath properly. We had the humidifier going but it did not seem to be enough. This morning I used saline spray and it seems to have loosen some of his goobers.

All in all I think Christophe has more energy then me. I have spent the day sitting at my laptop and drinking tea; while Christophe seemed to have found the energy to make toum with his papa.



If you want to try to make your own toum:

Ingredients:

* 3-4 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
* ¼ cup of vegetable or olive oil (or less depending on garlic used)
* 1 lemon, juiced
* ¼ teaspoon salt

Preparation:

For a truly authentic preparation of Toum, a mortar and pestle is used. If a mortar and pestle are unavailable, ingredients can be blended using a food processor.

Start by crushing the garlic cloves until a smooth consistency. Add salt and mix further. Once garlic and salt are of desired, smooth consistency, gradually add oil.

Add lemon juice and mix. The finished product should be smooth, paste-like, and creamy. Serve immediately or chill in the refrigerator.

Recipe taken from About.com