Hello! My name is Shannon Overmiller. I’m the chef of The Majestic in Old Town Alexandria.

I will be preparing for you now garlic aioli, which is basically a garlicy mayonnaise. This is one of the garnishes to the fried green tomatoes. The texture is nice because it balances out the warm fried texture of the tomato with a nice creamy counterpart. It’s a natural dish, it’s a natural flavoring enhancer for a fried item. Any mayonnaise based sauce.

So today to begin, I have a mixer here. I’m going to start with separating 2 yolks, always reserving your whites, for future use. Placing into the mixer, simply separating by either using the 2 shells or even through your fingers. At this step, what you would like to do, is turn the mixer on high, for a period of 10 minutes or almost until fluffy and white. You also want to add in the equivalent of 3 or 4 cloves of garlic finely chopped or minced. This is a stage where you want to beat your eggs and your garlic until fluffy and white, it’s very imperative that you do this.

So at this stage, you have to let the aioli go for 10 minutes, then you will slowly begin to emulsify your olive oil. So once your eggs have reached the fluffy white point in the garlic mixer, this is when you want to start to slowly add your oils, very slowly, because you don’t want the emulsification to break. This process is called emulsification. Start out with your olive oil and you’ll notice I do a slow steady stream of the olive oil, 2 cups olive oil. This is lengthy process, but you have to take your time to do this correctly, or your mixture will break. And you won’t get the mayonnaise consistency that you want. Once you added all your olive oil, then you go in with the canola oil. This is 3 cups of canola oil. Same process, slow emulsification. All together, this process will take you about 15 minutes.

Now as you reach the mayonnaise consistency, what you want to do is season your aioli. We have the garlic inside but we also need to add in the cayenne pepper, a pinch of salt to taste, and your lemon juice for your acid. All of these things vary. There is no exact recipe for this. This has to be the right balance of acid, heat not too hot, but just in the back of your throat, and salt. These are personal preferences, whatever you prefer. The most important thing is that you add the lemon and the salt at the last because at the end, this can break your mixture. So you don’t want to add this to the very end after all of your oils have been emulsified into the mixture. A pinch of cayenne, generous with the salt, approximately 2 teaspoons, plus or minus. Then the juice of 2 lemons approximately. Be careful of the seeds. And that’s aioli.