Garlic Aioli

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Garlic aioli is one of the most popular restaurant sauces for a very good reason. Tangy, rich, and with plenty of garlic flavor, garlic aioli is an amazing and simple sauce to make at home.

For more flavorful sauces, why not make this flavorful Lemon Aioli? Or try and make a tasty Garlic Butter Sauce instead? You can also use this on some Air Fryer Potato Wedges for a great snack!

Garlic Aioli

Garlic is probably the greatest flavor there is – pretty much every savory dish in the world can be improved with just a little bit of garlic.

However, instead of altering the recipe by trying to add garlic to it, why not just make this simple and quick garlic aioli to add a bit of extra garlic flavor to your meal?

This recipe makes for a really quick aioli that is balanced with the use of sugar and lemon juice to make something you want to spread on toast and dip fries in all at once.     

Garlic Aioli Ingredients

Make sure you look at the recipe card at the very bottom for the exact amounts so that you know exactly what to buy for this recipe.

• Mayonnaise

• Garlic

• Lemon juice

• Granulated sugar

• Salt & pepper

How To Make Garlic Aioli

• Combine all ingredients together in a measuring cup, stirring until mixed together completely

• Add in more garlic to taste, as well as salt, to help balance the intensity of the aioli

• Refrigerate until needed, and then serve in individual portions, storing no more than 4 days in the fridge

Is This A True Aioli?

Sharp-eyed readers will probably realize that this recipe doesn’t actually make an honest to goodness aioli, but it is instead more of a flavored mayonnaise. No real aioli usually contains mayonnaise whatsoever.

This is because true aiolis are actually mayonnaise made without using egg, but instead garlic is the emulsifying ingredients.

Mayonnaise is basically just a stable emulsion of oil and something that helps stabilize the oil and trap air – with mayo, the lecithin in the egg yolks does this.

However, garlic has a good amount of emulsifying properties as well, allowing you to make a stable, mayo-like substance out of just garlic and oil.

If you did that, you would end up with a true garlic aioli, known in the Middle East as Taum.

However, there isn’t really a large difference between true aioli and the recipe listed here – they both make a stable mayo-like dip that tastes strongly of garlic!

While there will always be plenty of people that get heated about this sort of thing, the truth is that it doesn’t really matter – if it tastes good, who cares?

How To Prepare The Garlic Differently For Different Flavors

One of the interesting things about this recipe, and indeed most recipes where garlic is the main flavoring, is that you can really change the final flavor by altering how you prepare the garlic for this recipe.

While most people have a preferred way to prepare their garlic, and in fact, many people prefer just to buy pre-cut or pre-crushed garlic to save time, all of the different ways of preparing individual cloves of garlic can actually significantly affect the final product.

This is because of the way that the flavor of garlic is created.

The flavor of garlic primarily comes from the compound allicin, which only forms when two other compounds known as alliinase and allin interact.

These two compounds are not stored next to each other inside the garlic clove; instead, the garlic needs to be broken apart by cutting, crushing, or pressing to get them to interact and make that distinctive garlic flavor.

How you can affect the flavor of your garlic is by changing up how you break down the clove so that you can use it in your recipe.

Chopping garlic helps to break it apart into tiny individual pieces, but the pieces themselves are still pretty large on a molecular scale.

For even more allicin development, you can crush your garlic clove – by crushing it, almost all of the alliinase and allin interact, producing far more allicin than would be normally created just when chopping the garlic.

This allows you to help balance the flavor of your garlic aioli, depending on how strong you want the garlic flavor to be.

For more garlic flavor, crush the clove completely, either with a mortar and pestle or with the flat of your knife.

If you are having some trouble getting the garlic fully crushed, sprinkle a little bit of coarse salt over the garlic clove – the sale acts as an abrasive, making it easier to grind up the garlic.

However, if you prefer a lighter flavor of flavor, simply roughly chop the garlic clove instead.

Feel free also to adjust the salt, sugar, and lemon juice to really customize the final flavor of your garlic aioli and make sure it tastes just right.  

Looking for more delicious Marinades, Sauces & Salad Dressings recipes? Try these out:

• Chimichurri Recipe

• Homemade Teriyaki Sauce

• Poppy Seed Dressing

Happy Cooking

Love,

Karlynn

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