What Is Aioli? And What Does It Have To Do With Mayonnaise?

Have you seen restaurant menus with one or more dishes being served with an aioli and wondered how do they make that sauce?  Would you like to be able to easily add a sauce like that to some of the dishes you make at home?  It is very easy to do that! 

The picture shows a tapas dish that I did this week for a family birthday party where I used a simple lemon aioli.  I grilled my Merguez sausage and sliced the links on a long diagonal.  I put some lemon aioli on a crostini, added the sausage, and topped it with a strip of fire roasted red pepper.  They were delicious!

You can get the write-up and the recipe for making Merguez sausage from my blog page using the link below:

Homemade Merguez Sausage

Let’s start with what is an aioli.  For an authoritative answer here is what Wikipedia says:

Aioli, allioli, or aïoli; is a cold sauce consisting of an emulsion of garlic and olive oil; it is found in the cuisines of the northwest Mediterranean.

The names mean “garlic and oil” in Catalan and Provençal. It is found in the cuisines of the Mediterranean coasts of Spain and France.

Some versions of the sauce are closer to a garlic mayonnaise, incorporating egg yolks and lemon juice, whereas other versions lack egg yolk and contain more garlic. The latter gives the sauce a pastier texture, making it more laborious to produce as the emulsion is harder to stabilize. There are many variations, such as adding lemon juice or other seasonings. In France, it may include mustard.

The simplest way to make an aioli is to add garlic to mayonnaise.  But how you do that and what mayonnaise you use will have a MAJOR impact on how your sauce tastes. 

Growing up our refrigerator had Hellman’s Mayonnaise in it, and I hated it.  To me it was just sweet glop.  It had to be used to make tuna fish or chicken salad sandwiches, but they were never favorites of mine because they were just too sweet.  When Beth and I took the one week cooking class in France, on the first day of class we made mayonnaise.  It was an eye opener for me.  There was no sugar or any other sweetener in it, and it was delicious! 

What is mayonnaise?  Going back to Wikipedia again “Mayonnaise is an emulsion of oil, egg yolk, and an acid, either vinegar or lemon juice”.  Note that there is NO mention of sugar or any sweetener in that definition.  We took an egg yolk, a little Dijon mustard and whisked them together with some olive oil and canola oil and a little lemon juice. 

Making a cup of mayonnaise took less than 10 minutes and the cost of it was the cost on one egg plus some olive and canola oil that we had on the shelf.  We used it in our cooking class to make several sauces and came away with a totally different opinion about mayonnaise.  You can download the recipe for homemade mayonnaise below:

Why ever buy mayonnaise at the store when it is so easy and inexpensive to make?  And it tastes much better!  Unfortunately, there are some good reasons why the better choice should sometimes be store-bought.  First, the smallest amount of mayonnaise that this recipe makes is a little over a cup.  Very few recipes call for that much mayonnaise.  Second, homemade mayonnaise has a VERY short shelf life.  It needs to be consumed within an hour of being put on the food and should not be kept in the refrigerator for more than about 4 hours.  The reason is that it uses a raw egg yolk and has no preservatives.  If you are just going to use a tablespoon or two of mayonnaise you would be throwing out most of what you made.  For food for something like a picnic, it would likely spoil before the food was eaten. 

There are some store-bought mayonnaise brands that I find tolerable.  In our refrigerator is Hellman’s Olive Oil Mayonnaise.  It does have over 20 ingredients on the label and the 7^th one is sugar so it does have a little bit of a sweet taste.  A great many of our convenience foods have too much salt, too much sweetener, and loads of preservatives that let them last for months from when they are made to when they are consumed, much of that time on an unrefrigerated shelf somewhere.  None of those things are good for us.  The list of ingredients does include egg yolks, and I don’t think you can make mayonnaise out of cooked egg yolks, so those preservatives must be pretty powerful.  If I need just a small amount of mayonnaise, or a longer time before the food is eaten, I can live with a store-bought brand like this one. I think of it as a necessary evil. 

When making an aioli it is important to remember that raw garlic can have a very strong taste.  What I do is to crush my garlic and then squeeze lemon juice over the garlic and let it sit for about 15 minutes.  The acid in the lemon juice will cook the garlic and make the taste softer.  This is the same way that sliced fish can be put in lemon juice and that will cook the fish in a way that is called ceviche. 

If I just need a tablespoon or two of aioli, then I will use that store-bought mayonnaise.  The garlic and lemon juice that I add reduces the sweetness and adds significant flavor and is a pretty good aioli.  The recipe for making that simple lemon aioli can be downloaded below:

I hope this write up is interesting and helpful and I encourage you to download the two recipes and give it a try. Your feedback is always appreciated and If you give this post a Like, it will encourage more people to take a look at it.