Go to the Recipe: Toum (Levantine Garlic Sauce)
This yield seemed massive for a garlic sauce so I tried halving the recipe and it was a bit finicky to make it work in my vitamix 12 cup food processor. LOTS of scraping the bowl down. That being said the result was really tasty - unbelievably similar to what you would get at a good shawarma shop.
Glad you liked it! We settled on a 1-quart yield because toum has such a long (refrigerated) shelf life (1 month!), and also because that batch size makes for the smoothest user experience in terms of processing. As you noted, reducing the batch size makes it more challenging to build the emulsion in a food processor that's got a 12-cup or larger capacity. We find toum to be so versatile and delicious (it's great in sandwiches, as a dipping sauce, in salad dressings, tossed with roasted veggies, stirred into soups, as a base for marinades etc etc) that going through a quart in a month didn't feel like a challenge. If anything, we found it challenging to make a 1x batch last a whole month!
I realize now you're absolutely right - my half serving didn't even last two days...
For making toum, I’ve always removed the germ from each clove of garlic (the pain of this is a major contributor to why I don’t make toum quite so often). Did you test whether or not this makes a noticeable difference? My belief was that older garlic can taste much harsher if this step is skipped.
During testing, I found that removing the germ actually made the toum milder than it should be. As long as the garlic is fresh and the germ isn’t sprouting, it doesn’t need to be removed. That sharpness is part of what makes toum toum. I’m hoping that without that finicky step, you’ll give this version a go!
Older garlic tastes a bit more harsh not because the germ is harsh flavored, but because sugars in the garlic were used up to create and grow the germ. Older garlic is less sweet and due to dehydration, more concentrated. So keep the germ (as long as it is not sprouting out) in whatever recipes you are making.
I have to say that if you emulsify toum correctly it will not break. This elaboration is gold.
This is a great recipe! The sauce emulsified perfectly and it has a very nice almost jiggly and fluffy consistency. The garlic flavour is a little bit harsher than I like it, and I agree that the yield is MASSIVE, but overall it was worth making.
Toum is powerful stuff! Big yield, big reward. We promise you'll go through it faster than you think.
