Cook With What You Have

Discover recipes using ingredients already in your kitchen. Results are ranked by how well they match your pantry.

How It Works

  1. Add Your Pantry - Enter ingredients you have at home.
  2. Search or Discover - Find recipes by keyword or click "What Can I Make?"
  3. Start Cooking - View your match percentage and visit the original recipe.

We don't host full recipes-we link directly to original sources.

Toum (Lebanese Garlic Sauce)

Toum (Lebanese Garlic Sauce)
No machine-readable author provided. Charbel assumed (based on copyright claims). · No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims). · CC BY-SA 3.0 · View on Wikimedia Commons

Toum or thoum is a garlic sauce used in Lebanon. The method below is the traditional way toum is prepared in most parts of Lebanon.

Yield
1 cup

Ingredients

  • 10–40 g fresh, peeled garlic (less for a milder thoum, more for a stronger one)
  • ¾ cup olive oil
  • 1 lemon, juiced and strained
  • ¼–½ tsp salt
Your pantry · Interactive controls load with JavaScript

Method

  1. Use a pestle (traditionally wooden) to smash the garlic with salt until very smooth; you can add the salt at the beginning or after the garlic is well smashed.thumb|Wooden mortar used to prepare toum|300x300px
  2. Gradually mix in the oil—start by adding one drop at a time and stirring the oil into the garlic with the pestle. After you've added about 1 tbsp of oil and it's been well incorporated, you can drizzle the oil in rather than adding it drop by drop. After half of the oil is added, alternate a bit of lemon juice with a bit of oil. Don't stop for long while mixing; it's necessary to keep stirring, stopping only for very brief periods. When finished the toum will have a similar consistency to thick mayonnaise.

Notes

  • You can also crush the garlic and salt to a very smooth paste and then use a blender or food processor to incorporate the oil and lemon juice.
  • The pH of some olive oils can promote breaking of the emulsion.
  • In Lebanon the pestle used is usually wooden; some new one are made of synthetic materials; occasionally you'll see one carved of stone. Carved stone pestles are usually used for kebbeh nayyeh.

Categories