The Yankee Kitchen: Aioli Salad Dressing

Yankee Magazine Lifestyle Editor Amy Traverso shows you how to make a Aioli salad dressing. Enjoy! Hi, I’m Amy Traverso, Lifestyle Editor at Yankee Magazine. Right now I’m making an aioli, which is a traditional garlic sauce. You will find it in France and Spain traditionally, but we use it here. It’s delicious. This is delicious with grilled meats, with vegetables. It’s especially good with the composed Nicoise salad that I’ll be making in another video, so be sure to check that out. So what we’re starting with here are four garlic cloves and a teaspoon of salt. And what we want to do is use a mortar and pestle to smash them up together, and you want to create a paste with the garlic and the salt together. Okay. So I’m all done with this. I’ve got a really nice, kind of creamy looking garlic paste. That’s exactly the texture you want. It should look kind of like butter when you’re done. And it does take a little muscle power to get there, but it goes pretty quickly. Okay. So now what I’m going to do, I want to create an emulsion with the garlic and the olive oil. I want them to kind of mix up, make friends, and bond together. To do that, I want to put the olive oil in really slowly and whisk as I go. I’m going to put half the olive oil. This is a half cup total. So you want to put a quarter cup of olive oil in. And you’re just drizzling slowly because the garlic and salt and the oil need a little time. You don’t want to drizzle it so quickly that you have big clumps of oil. You kind of want to let the olive oil get absorbed before you add in more, and that’s the trick to making this sauce. That’s how you get it to be nice and thick instead of thin and soupy. At this point, I’m going to add an acid. The lemon juice, this is lemon juice, it not only adds flavor, but helps the emulsification process. So again, I’m going to just slowly drizzle this in, whisking as I go, and letting it bond with the oil and the garlic. Okay. And then the last step is just to add the rest of the olive oil. Now this is a recipe that can feed a good number of people. It doesn’t look like much, but it is very potent, so a little goes a long way. Once I’m done here, we’ll have a half cup of oil total in the sauce. And that’s it. I hoped you enjoyed it. This is Amy Traverso with The Yankee Kitchen, and thanks for watching.