Aioli in authentic Catalan style

Aioli in Catalonia means garlic, olive oil, a pinch of salt, that's it. Not for nothing, we call it allioli: all-i-oli, meaning garlic-and-oil. Watch the video below, read the step-by-step instructions, and you'll learn how to make this delicious and colorful homemade sauce in no time.

Aioli made with mortar and pestle

Allioli is an essential sauce of the Mediterranean Catalan cuisine you can add to many dishes and foods, use as a dip with pieces of bread, and as a spread on a bread slice or toast.

Catalan aioli is indispensable with grilled meats, grilled rabbit, and outdoors costellades, which are meals based on lamb chops grilled in an open fire. In a way, costellades are the equivalent of American and Northern European barbecues, so in this sense allioli is a barbecue sauce.

In several fish dishes of the traditional seaside cuisine, you add aioli or broken allioli a moment before the cooking time is over. Typical examples are fish soups or seafood stews like suquet de peix with aioli, or this lamb chop recipe.

You can use allioli to top potatoes, vegetables, steamed mussels... As you can see, aioli has many uses in the Mediterranean Catalan cuisine.

My video focuses on showing the circular movement of the pestle in the mortar in order to bind the garlic and the olive oil that make Catalan allioli. In Catalonia we've always made allioli like this, and anyone can learn how to do it.

I make a point of demonstrating it as some people wrongly assert that it's impossible to bind garlic and oil, so you have no choice but to add eggs. Adding eggs to allioli may distort the taste of a dish, particularly fish. Click play and enjoy the video!

Watch the video: How to Make Catalan-style Allioli

Ingredients for one cup of aioli

3 cloves garlic � peeled
1 cup (25 cl) extra virgin olive oil � If at all possible use Catalan arbequina olive oil. Failing that, use a mild Greek or Italian extra virgin olive oil.
1 pinch salt

How to prepare allioli

Peel the garlic cloves and cut them in half lengthwise to check if they have greenish shoots. If you see sprouts, cut them off, and discard them.

Garlic sprouts make it more difficult to bind the aioli, and they make it much too hot as well.

If you are sure that the garlic is very fresh, just peel the cloves, and you can begin to mash them in the mortar without cutting them in half.

Drop the garlic cloves in your mortar, add a pinch of salt, and start pounding with the pestle.

Pound and mash the garlic and the salt with the pestle until you obtain a very fine and smooth paste. This step is essential for binding garlic and olive oil properly with mortar and pestle. If your garlic paste is not smooth and fine enough, the allioli will tend to break much easier.

Now, while you stir the mixture with the pestle in one hand, start adding the olive oil very slowly, almost drop by drop, with the oil dispenser that you hold in the other hand, as you see in the video.

Stir constantly and always in the same direction, describing circular movements, as you see in the video, until you obtain a thick paste. In the pictures and video, you can see the texture of an authentic allioli in Catalan style.

Buying a mortar and pestle

If you want to make aioli you need an mortar and pestle like the one you see in the video and the pictures. I reccommend you an online shop that sells authentic mortars from Breda, a small Catalan town with a long pottery tradition. They really know their trade.

Click here for a high-quality mortar and pestle.