Our usual Christmas dinner is my holiday paella, the dear husband’s favorite festive dish. One of his particularly warmly received elements has always been the homemade aioli sauce I whip up on the side. As doubtless you know, this is a mayonnaise made with olive oil, and combined with garlic. Lots and lots of garlic.
So there I was doing the paella prep. It always involves a plethora of garlic cloves. At least four for the paella itself, and then about eight for the aioli.
I mentioned that we like garlic, didn’t I? Perhaps you remembered that.
Anyway, I’d been reading, as I so often do, old cooking magazines. In one of them was this splendid sounding, though unlikely, hint: if you have a lot of garlic cloves that need to be peeled, just stick them all in a pint jar, screw on the cover, and shake like crazy until said skins begin to remove themselves. Did I believe it? Well, let’s say I was dubious. But I had all afternoon. So I gave it a try. And by heavens, it actually worked! A new garlic hack that works!
Piling the now peeled cloves back in the jar, I thought, “Why not just cover them with olive oil?” I was going to need the oil for both the paella and the aioli, so a little extra garlic flavor would not come amiss. So I poured the oil on with an unstinting hand.
I looked admiringly at the cloves nestled in the gold oil. There was something else nagging at the back of my mind, though. I went and dug up the old magazine I’d been reading, and paged through it. There it was. What had tried to push up into consciousness. A recipe for garlic confit.
Garlic confit is just cloves of garlic cooked super gently in olive oil. They get all sweet and soft. I’d never attempted this before, since there are always these terrifying warnings about storing the confit in the oil. Bacteria! Illness! Potential death! I never felt like dealing with it. But today was different. I was planning on using all the oil and all the garlic, so no harm, no foul.
This was how:
12 good sized garlic cloves in a small pot. Covered with olive oil. Put on medium low heat until bubbles began to show, then turned the heat down so that the bubbles just gently rose up. Gave the cloves a stir whenever I thought of it. Thirty minutes later, had a look, waiting for them to turn a little golden. Gave them another five minutes. Took them off the heat, let them cool.
Then I tossed eight of the cloves into the food processor. Normally I would have pureed them in a mortar and pestle and added them to an egg yolk, which I would use to make aioli by hand. But this was Christmas. I wanted a lot of aioli, enough to last for leftovers the next day. And with the food processor, you can use a whole egg, for chemical reaction reasons that are a bit beyond me. So instead of doing the aioli by hand, I broke an egg into the food processor, followed by an additional egg yolk (adds unction, and I save the white to add to an omelet later on). Salt. Ran the machine, while pouring very slowly almost all the oil I’d confited the garlic in. Tasted. A little more salt.
I was a little worried. The whole thing tasted so . . . elegant. Not rustic. We’re so used to the rough and ready fresh garlic aioli, I was worried this would be greeted with pushback. Still, philosophical, I decanted it and put it aside till dinner. In the meanwhile, I used the rest of the confit oil. First, a few spoonfuls to coat the shrimp and scallops waiting for the final paella touches. Then the rest to sauté elements for the paella: first, three quail (for me, the nonvegetarian) and a sliced andouille sausage (for both me and the vegetarian husband, who pretends the sausage is tofu based), which I then removed for a later addition to the rice. Then in the same oil, half a chopped onion, four squashed confit garlic cloves, three oven baked Roma tomatoes and a chipotle chile en adobo with a little sauce still clinging on it. After that was nice and melded, toasted a cup and a half of brown rice in it, added four cups of boiling duck/shrimp stock I’d had in the freezer (made from saving bones and shrimp shells until there are enough to make a good stock), brought to a boil, tasted for salt, put in a preheated 375 degree oven. Cooked 55 minutes. Took it out, added the sausage and a handful of frozen peas. Arranged the quail on the top. Scattered the raw shrimp and scallops about. Put it uncovered back in the oven for fifteen minutes. Had a skeptical look. But no, it all looked beautifully done, smelled terrific too, so I took it out, covered it, and left it for fifteen minutes for the flavors to meld while I made the salad, cut some lemon quarters for the table, and poured out more wine.
(About that salad, a trick I use when I do the food processor thing is throw some chopped cabbage in the empty container without washing the garlic mayo out first. Process. Chopped coleslaw in aioli! A perfect side for paella.)
While that final sit was happening, I asked the husband to come taste the sauce and see if it was too tame for him. He tasted. He thought. He tasted again, and as he did, his eyes began to light up from inside. “Oh,” he said earnestly. “I wouldn’t have thought it. That is absolutely delicious.”
And it was. It all was. So I highly recommend that garlic confit thing. Don’t store it though, use it right away. Or at least, read all the warnings on the internet if you plan on saving it for something else.