Mise En Place: Aioli All Wrong

Jerry: Are you still Master of your Domain?

Elaine: I am Queen of the Castle!

Recent events in the kitchen left me hands on head, brow furrowed. I had ruined the homemade aioli I was attempting and wasted 2 cups of ridiculously expensive Spanish olive in the process! By “ruined” I mean a separated, watery mess of egg yolks, extra virgin olive oil, lemon, garlic and Dijon mustard. A mess by any measure. Ish.

So, you may be asking, why go to the trouble of making homemade aioli when an inexpensive facsimile can be had through food purveyors like Hellmans or Best Foods? To that question I can only reply that homemade aioli is (or can be) to mayonnaise what Iberian jamon is to Hormel Black Label bacon. Like everything, it’s the same, but different.

How this culinary disaster happened is now beside the point. Suffice to say that the term “leaving well enough alone” often applies in my life. OK, I admit it: I overbeat my mayo. Go figure, over beat aioli and you absolutely ruin it. Not a little. All the way wrecked. One second it is an almost perfect emulsification of egg and oil, the next it’s a culinary Katrina.

So there I stood, chastened and, well, ashamed of myself with an unusable, unsavory mess in my bowl. Before tossing it all down the drain, I decided to check in with the patron saint of home cooks and amateur food-o-philes worldwide to try to figure out exactly where and how I could have gone so terribly wrong.

Julia Child to the rescue.

I recently procured a treasured volume of the book Julia and Jacques Cook at Home via Culpepper Books, which is a splendid (albeit narrow) slice of previously-read literary heaven located in the Proctor District. JJC@H reads more like a novel or creative non-fiction than as a recipe collection, with the key literary constructs of conflict, crisis and resolution fully intact.

In the section on making your own mayo, I learned that aioli is like life. While simple it’s not necessarily easy. It’s among the most elementary, foundational skills of cooking, but it also darned easy to ruin, leaving you (well, me) with greasy glop.

In her section on aioli, Julia not only offers tips on making the perfect aioli, she devotes a long passage to its rescusitation. DON’T THROW AWAY a separated aioli, she admonishes, it can be saved. In fact, learning how to salvage the sauce is a critical kitchen skill, since sooner or later you are bound screw up. Saint Julia goes so far as to recommend ruining a batch on purpose, so as to learn the skill of salvation for when you really need it. Acquiring this skill, she says, will provide the home cook with a profound sense of, well, mastery. The idea being that acquiring the skill of fixing something broken is often more satisfying than creating something approaching perfection in the first place.

You can read up on it yourself, but here’s the trick. Place a dab of Dijon in a metal bowl and whisk in a tablespoon of your wrecked dreck. Once it emulsifies and thickens, keep adding more in tiny increments, all the while whisking as though your life depended upon the outcome. Before long you’ll have half a batch rescued and then you can add the rest faster. Then stop.

Following my patron saint’s tutelage, I did in fact save the mayo. And Julia was right about that mastery thing as well. As happy as I was about the taste of my mayo, I was more pleased at having saved what was lost.

There’s a life lesson in there somewhere, but I’ll resist the urge to beat my gentle readers over the head with it. Suffice to say that in the kitchen you can save a ruined aioli but you can’t ungrill an overdone steak (which is a bitch if you just liquidated your 401K to pay for porterhouses at the resplendent Dave’s Meat and Produce). Grace is most often granted to those who can discern the difference.

So, am I the Master of my Domain, the Lord of the Manor? That’s a question with a different answer from day to day. Thanks to a teaspoon of inspiration from Julia Child though, for one golden moment of grace, Yes I was.

Jacque Pepin’s Homemade Aioli

Ingredients
2 large egg yolks
1 ½ teaspoons good quality Dijon mustard
1 tbs. wine vinegar or lemon juice
Dash of salt and pepper
Up to 2 cups good quality oil (the taste of the oil greatly influences the aioli. For a less robust flavor, go with canola or peanut oil. Extra virgin olive oil gives a pronounced taste).

Whisk the first 4 ingredients in a non-reactive bowl. Very slowly add the olive oil, starting with only a drop at a time. Once the sauce emulsifies, add in a thin stream, whisking all the while. When it is done, STOP. Continued beating may break the sauce. Don’t re-whisk an aioli that has been in the refrigerator, it will separate. Let it come to room temperature first.

To further improve the aioli, add chopped fresh herbs of your choice. Basil, tarragon, and parsley are classic additions.