I love Lebanese food - which you might think a strange thing to say as most of the food on my website is British or Mediterranean.
What I love about Lebanese food is the beautiful tender meat grilled on a charcoal furnace, more-ish pillows of paper thin bread and the piles of incredibly fresh salads and vegetables. The garlic sauce is heaven. Living in London, it’s so much easier to go to a Lebanese restaurant or café and eat the most amazing food that I could never replicate at home. There is no way I can get my barbecue as hot as the charcoal pits in one of those restaurants.
The only dish I try and reproduce at home is the garlic sauce as it makes any barbecued meat I do attempt taste seriously good. I have adulterated the pure white Lebanese garlic sauce by adding parsley because I love the flavour of garlic and parsley together.
Beware; this sauce is incredibly pungent when it has just been freshly made. It’s best to leave it in the fridge for a couple of hours (or overnight) to settle down.
I find that it keeps a good couple of weeks in the fridge either in a bowl covered in cling film or decanted into a jar and closed with a lid.
Miraculous ingredients: garlic, Burford Brown eggs, lemon juice
Garlic & parsley sauce
Ingredients
1 head of garlic (approx. 70g), peeled and roughly chopped
1 egg yolk (Burford Browns)
2 teaspoons water
2 tablespoons lemon juice (almost a whole lemon)
200ml sunflower oil
50ml olive oil
20g fresh parsley, stalks removed and finely chopped
Method
Use a mini blitzer/chopper or food processor to make the sauce. Add all the roughly chopped garlic, the egg yolk, water and lemon juice and blitz for a minute until smooth.
Drizzle in a small amount of oil (about a tablespoon) and blitz for a minute to emulsify all the ingredients. With the blitzer running, very slowly drizzle in the rest of the sunflower – it will take about 5 minutes to incorporate all the oil to make the sauce. Finally add all the parsley, blitz for a minute and the sauce is done.
Preparation time 10 minutes, blitzing time 10 minutes