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Traditional Provencal aioli recipe
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Aioli is a garlic mayonnaise made of garlic, egg, lemon juice, and olive oil. In Provence, aioli (or more formally, Le Grand Aioli) also designates a complete dish consisting of various boiled vegetables (usually carrots, potatoes, and green beans), boiled fish (normally salt cod), and boiled eggs served with the aioli sauce.
While modern cooks have taken to making aioli in a blender or food processor, the traditional method is to use a mortar and pestle which gives the sauce a creamier texture. The technique described below comes from J.B. Reboul's classic cookbook, La Cuisiniere Provencale, published in 1897 and widely considered to be the bible of Provencal cooking.
Take two cloves of garlic per person , peel them, place them in a mortar, reduce them to a paste with a pestle; add a pinch of salt, an egg yolk and pour in the oil in a thin thread while turning with the pestle. Take care to add the oil very slowly and, during this time, never stop turning; you should obtain a think pommade. After having added about three or four tablespoons of oil, add the juice of a lemon and a teaspoon of tepid water, continue to add oil little by little and, when the pommade again becomes too thick, add another few drops of water, without which it falls apart, so to speak, the oil separating itself from the rest.
If, despite all precautions, this accident should occur, one must remove everything from the mortar, put into it another egg yolk, a few drops of lemon juice and, little by little, spoonful by spoonful, add the unsuccessful aioli while turning the pestle constantly. This one calls "reinstating the aioli" (relever l'aioli).
An aioli for seven to eight persons will absorb something over two cups of oil.
In his similarly classic book, Simple French Food, Richard Olney recommends toning down the recipe for non-Provençal palates unaccustomed to such a heavy dose of garlic. He suggests four cloves of garlic for an aioli serving 8 people. He also recommends starting with two egg yolks before starting to add the oil.
Photo courtesy of Chris John Beckett
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The History of Gastronomy
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Check out our new "food for thought" video on youtube.com. Please share it if you find it of interest.
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Kitchen Garden Day Celebrations
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For those of you new to Kitchen Gardeners International, we organize a global garden party on the fourth Sunday of August each year which we aptly named Kitchen Garden Day. The day started as a tongue-in-cheek challenge to the snackfood makers of the world who have claimed the entire month of February as "Snackfood Month". Our logic was that if the fluorescent orange cheese-puff makers of the world could have an entire month to celebrate their vision of good eating, home gardeners and cooks deserved at least a day. The video above was some local press coverage we had in Maine.
What started in one backyard in Maine is slowly, but surely spreading to others and a few frontyards too! Kitchen Garden Day this year (August 26th) will be recognized in different places and in different ways: a street parties, picnics , potlucks, gardening workshops, and locally-sourced dinners cooked by area chefs.
Why not join the fun and organize a gathering of your own with friends and good food? But, please, no artificially-flavored bacon snacks or foods containing "blue #40". Those are for another day month.
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July 2007 Newsletter
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Dear Kitchen Gardener,
Walking through the well-known farmers' market in Uzès,
France, as I recently had a chance to do, is a religious experience for
food lovers. The
olive stands alone are worth the trip. Add to that heaping
tables of sun-drenched produce, artisan breads and cheeses, a
mind-boggling choice of honeys, meats and seafood fished from the nearby
Mediterranean Sea and you have all the
makings of a memorable meal, if not several.
In fact, the quality and
variety of the produce is so dazzling that you might be tempted to ask
yourself why any area resident would bother growing some of his or her
own. Yet, despite the fresh bounty on offer twice a week at the Uzès
market, the kitchen garden, or "potager" as the French call it,
seemed much alive and well where I was staying.
I had a chance to meet and
speak with a few gardeners while I was there. If they grow some of
their own food, it's for the same reasons that you and I do: taste,
variety, freshness, economics, concerns about the environment, and, most
importantly, because they enjoy the process. My trip
reinforced what I already knew: kitchen gardening is a universal
language with many different dialects. What's different is that
some of us have a better garden view out our back door than others!
I learned a lot while I was
there. Rather than try to share it all in one gush, I'll let the
stories, pictures, and recipes trickle out over the course of the next
several months. In fact, if there's sufficient interest, we may at
some stage even consider organizing a KGI trip for those of you
interested in seeing and tasting the pleasures of Provence firsthand.
I'll look forward to updating
next month in the week leading up to
Kitchen Garden Day. I hope you'll find a way of recognizing
the day in some small way. We've got a lot to celebrate and share
with others.
Warm regards,
PS: Interested in starting a
local kitchen garden group in your area?
Check out
our new info page on gPods
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| 5. |
Building a simple compost sifter
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By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, August 16, 2007 in The Washington Post
If compost is the holy grail of organic gardening, what's holier than thou? Sifted compost.
What you want in a perfect mature compost is, of course, organic matter so fully broken down that the original ingredients -- whether straw, weeds, kitchen scraps or goat droppings -- are no longer recognizable. Finished compost looks like very rich, dark, fine soil. But even the best soil contains stones, twigs and the like. Sifted compost doesn't. It is the 400-thread-count soil amendment.
Grade-A sifted compost has many uses. Let's say you want to renovate the lawn in the fall. Using a shovel, you scatter sifted compost over the worst patches, rake it into the iffy grass growing there (if any) then sow seeds and water it thoroughly. The fine-textured compost provides an excellent seed bed. In fact, it is a good seed bed for anything, especially small, hard-to-germinate seeds such as carrot and onion. One trick is to dig a planting furrow, then fill it with sifted compost. You can even use it to start seeds in flats -- although compost must be completely mature and mellow for this purpose -- too much high-test nitrogen can burn tender seedlings. It is also a wonderful top-dressing for a vegetable garden, a luxury mulch that provides a good nutritional multivitamin while making your garden's soil look as dark and lustrous as a mink coat.
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