The World Table

An interactive culinary compendium: recipes, lexicon and study

Provence & the Midi · Main

Le Grand Aïoli

  • Intermediate
  • 45 min
  • roughly 2 of 4 for cost

aromatic · rich · bright · warm-spiced Leads with aromatics blooming from the first bite, richness that coats and comforts, fading in warm spice.

Ingredients

  • 400 g salt cod fillet, soaked 24 hours in cold water changed four times
  • 8 fat garlic cloves, green germ removed
  • 2 egg yolks at room temperature
  • 400 ml olive oil at room temperature, half fruity and half mild
  • 1 tsp coarse sea salt
  • 1 tbsp lemon juice
  • 500 g small waxy potatoes
  • 400 g green beans, topped
  • 6 carrots, halved lengthways
  • 1 small cauliflower, in florets
  • 1 fennel bulb, quartered
  • 6 eggs
  • 24 cooked petits gris snails (optional)
  • 1 bay leaf

Equipment

Mortar & pestle

The skills inside

Building an emulsionThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilSalted water & the float testMashing & puréeing

Allergen screen

Found: egg · fish · molluscs

Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.

Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.

Method

  1. Poach the soaked cod in barely moving water with the bay until it flakes at a fork, about 8 minutes, and lift it out before the flakes tighten and go stringy. 8 min
  2. Boil the eggs 9 minutes, and cook each vegetable separately in salted water: potatoes and carrots to a knife tip, beans and cauliflower still squeaking against the tooth. 9 min
  3. Pound the garlic with the coarse salt in a mortar until it is a wet sticky cream with no fibre left in it, then work in the yolks.
  4. Dribble in the oil in a thread, the pestle always turning the same way, until the sauce climbs the sides of the mortar and holds the pestle upright; loosen with the lemon juice and a teaspoon of warm water.
  5. Bring everything to the table warm or at room temperature on one platter with the mortar in the middle, and eat it slowly.

How to tell it is going right

This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.

Building an emulsion 40 recipes

  • It visibly thickens as the fat goes in, heavier and more opaque than either part was alone, which is the emulsion announcing itself.
  • At no point is there a pool of free fat sitting ahead of the work: fat went in no faster than it disappeared into the body.
  • Glossy and homogeneous, with no slick floating on top and no visible droplets standing apart in it.
  • It clings: coating what it is put on and holding a line, rather than running off and splitting into a puddle at the plate’s edge.
  • It survives standing: minutes later there is no ring of weeping liquid underneath and no film of fat breaking out on the surface.

Where it goes wrong The fat went in faster than the shear could break it up, or the temperature drifted out of the range the method needs: it breaks into grease over a thin liquid, and whisking the broken thing harder does nothing. The rescue is a fresh base, with the broken sauce worked into it slowly, as if it were the fat.

Mashing & puréeing 114 recipes

  • Smooth to the degree the dish asks for, judged on the tongue rather than by eye: no lumps, no fibres, no grit, unless texture is the point.
  • No gluey elasticity: a spoonful drops cleanly off the spoon rather than stretching in a rope behind it.
  • The consistency holds: it mounds on a spoon and stays there, neither slumping flat nor standing so stiff that a spoon has to cut it.
  • Nothing separates on the plate: no water or fat weeping out into a ring within a minute of serving.
  • The colour is even throughout, with no streaks of unincorporated fat, liquid, or seasoning at the edges of the bowl.

Where it goes wrong A starchy ingredient met a high-speed blade, so the cells burst and released their starch: what should be light comes out as an elastic glue that lifts off the spoon in one mass.

At the Table

The Pour
Fino or Manzanilla Sherry
Also Right
Muscadet or dry Riesling
From the Taps
Pilsner
Zero-Proof
Sparkling water with lemon

Salt-cured fish wants a bone-dry, saline partner: Sherry and Atlantic whites answer the cure without fighting it.

Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.

Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Le Grand Aïoli Technique: Building an emulsionThe skill inside this recipe The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Provence & the Midi kitchen