How to Make a Garlic Mayonnaise

Barton Seaver: Hi, I am Barton Seaver, and today we are going to cook Pan Seared Tilapia Fillet with balsamic glazed parsnips and a sweet garlic sauce. We are also going to garnish this dish with a little bit of bacon, but the first thing we are going to do is show you how to make the garlic sauce. This is one of my favorite things, and in my hand here we have a little bit of poached garlic. What I have done with the poached garlic is just put peeled garlic cloves into cold water, and you bring them up to a boil, and you repeat the process about three times. The preps of this is to get a nice soft garlic cloves that will just crush in your finger, just like, they are nice and soft. But the purpose of blanching it is to draw out the bitterness, indigestibilities of it and you are left with the sweet, soft, very nutty aromatic garlic flavor, it's absolutely wonderful.

Now what I have got here is a high speed blender, and we are going to take this garlic, this is about one whole head of garlic. We are just going to put that into the blender, and you can do this with the garlic warm or cold, whatever. I have got an egg yolk this will do here, so I will just take the white out, pretty easy process here to do it in your hands, I love the feeling of that. So we have got our egg yolk in there, we have got our garlic and what we are doing is, making a mayonnaise at this point really. We are going to be flavoring it with a little bit of lemon juice, I like the lemon juice in this, because this dish tends to be pretty rich, so you want some nice bit of a acidic taste, so we use a whole half of lemon. You can add a little bit more in, if you need to, and we have got about a tablespoon of water here as well.

Now purpose of that is just to facilitate the spinning of the garlic to make a nice puree. You want to season this now at this point as well. I have got kosher salt, just put a nice little pinch of that in there. So on low speed you always want to start your blender off on low speed here. This is an adjustable speed blender, so it is very convenient. Keep it covered and you can see that you are forming sauce in it. And then to make the emulsion we have a little bit of cooking oil here. You do not want to use olive oil. Olive oil hold air to it, so it voluminizes the product very quickly, and what we'll do here, is just pour in a very small straight steady stream of the oil.

Now this is how you make any mayonnaise, whether it just be a regular old flavored mayonnaise with just vinegar and lemon and salt, or anything, whatever you want to put into it, garlic or herbs anything. So as you go, you can turn up the speed just a little bit, that will help facilitate the pureeing of the garlic, but I like this sauce to be just a little bit chunky. It gives it a little bit of texture and visual interest on the plate. Now this recipe makes a little bit more than you are going to need for the actual plating of the tilapia here, but that is okay. The sauce keeps very well, it is great with grilled bread. It's awesome with tuna sandwiches or anything. So the excess quantity will keep in your fridge up to about a week or so.

So let's take a look in here, now this is about done. Now you see, we have got this nice rich sauce that just falls off the spoon, awesome. So with that done, we will pour that into a bowl, and we will just save that for a little bit later, when we start to go plate the rest of the tilapia dish, we will use that. So you can put this in the refrigerator, it will help to just solidify a little bit, give it a little bit more presence on the plate, and alright, that's it. In the next segment we will start cooking up our parsnips, and showing you how to prepare the tilapia.