What we call a kebab house the Turks poetically refer to as an ocakbaşı, and Mangal Kebab on the south side of Queens Boulevard certainly qualifies. The casual hangout spot has a wide range of kebabs and salads that cater to almost exclusively to a Turkish and otherwise Middle Eastern clientele.

You can order from a menu, but to eat like the locals do, head up to the showcase of marinated meat, fish, and vegetables and order whatever looks especially fresh. Adana kebabs ground with spicy red pepper may be your best bet, $8 for a small order and $12 for a large; the lamb is juicier and sweeter than the chicken. If you visit on a weekend, go for a lamb shank ($13) sticky-sweet with braising juices, or a bowl of brain soup, traditionally eaten in Turkey after last call. (It’s worth noting that Mangal is open late—for the neighborhood anyway—until 11 p.m.)

Extracting Moisture for Creamier Baba Ganoush
Next step: drainage. In Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty, he suggests transferring the scooped eggplant flesh to a fine-mesh strainer to drain off excess liquid. This is a good idea—the dip I made with drained eggplant flesh had a much better, creamier texture than the version made with undrained flesh—but it’s time-consuming, taking up to an hour for the eggplant to drain completely. Could I hasten the process?

I tried squeezing the eggplant in cheesecloth and pressing it through my fine-mesh strainer with a ladle. Both methods work, but they’re a bit messy. Instead, I reached for my salad spinner, placed the fat chunks of eggplant flesh around its perimeter, then took them for a gentle spin and watched as the brown, watery juices flowed out of them. I was left with eggplant as dry and concentrated in flavor as if I’d let it rest in a strainer for a full hour, in just about 30 seconds.

She’d wait until they were meltingly tender before recruiting me to carefully peel them, and then she’d mix them up with lemon juice, tahini, garlic, and olive oil. The resulting dip was simultaneously smoky, savory, bright, and creamy.

Could I say it was the best thing I’d ever had? No. Could I even say it was the best baba ganoush I could have imagined? Uh-uh. But what I had in that first bite was the promise of greatness, and I’ve been seeking that greatness ever since.

Like many great dishes, baba ganoush is extraordinarily simple in concept: Roast some eggplants; scrape out the flesh; mix it with some garlic, lemon, tahini, and olive oil; and serve. It’s in the details where things get a little more complicated.

Choosing and Cooking the Eggplant
First things first: the type of eggplant. Big ol’ globes are usually the eggplant of choice, but I find that smaller Italian eggplants tend to be more intensely flavored, have fewer seeds, and are smaller, and therefore quicker to cook, to boot.

A few simple tricks make this the richest, smokiest, creamiest baba ganoush in town.
Charring the eggplant over high heat infuses the baba ganoush with plenty of smokiness.
A salad spinner is the quickest and easiest way to remove moisture from the cooked eggplant flesh, concentrating its flavor.
Emulsifying the eggplant, tahini, and olive oil by hand, instead of using a food processor, produces a chunkier dip with pleasant textural contrast.
The first time I had a taste of truly excellent excellent baba ganoush—the Middle Eastern dip of roasted eggplant mixed with olive oil, sesame tahini, garlic, and lemon juice—it was made by a good friend of mine, an Israeli line cook who’d take time out of her afternoon to hover over the eggplants as they slowly charred over the open flames of the kitchen’s burners. She’d wait until they were meltingly tender before recruiting me to carefully peel them, and then she’d mix them up with lemon juice, tahini, garlic, and olive oil.

Ingredients
1 cup garlic cloves (4 1/2 ounces; 130g)
2 teaspoons Diamond Crystal kosher salt (for table salt, use 1 teaspoon)
1/4 cup (60g) fresh juice from about 2 lemons, divided
1/4 cup (60g) ice water, divided
3 cups (600g) neutral oil, such as grapeseed or canola, divided

If there’s one thing you should know about making baba ganoush, it’s this: Cook your eggplants until they’re done, then cook them some more. Your eggplants should be deeply charred and completely tender, collapsing at the slightest touch and giving no resistance when poked with a toothpick or knife. When you lift them from their stem caps with a pair of tongs, they should hang completely limp, like deflated hot-air balloons. A good rule of thumb? Cook them until you think they’re burnt beyond saving, and that’s when you’re good to go.

When cooking the eggplant, one of our primary goals is developing some nice smoky flavor. This comes from the charring of the skin and requires the intense radiation of a broiler or a direct flame. If you’ve got an outdoor grill, that’s your best bet; you want to carefully turn the eggplant directly on the flame until it is soft and charred. Otherwise, a broiler will do.

Mortar and Pestle Method: Depending on the size of your mortar, you may need to make the recipe in smaller batches, halving or quartering the ingredient amounts. In the mortar, combine garlic and salt and grind until it becomes a smooth paste. Work oil into paste 1 teaspoon at a time. After adding 1 tablespoon oil, work in a few drops of lemon juice. Repeat until all the oil, lemon juice, and water have been incorporated.

Special equipment
Food processor or mortar and pestle, paring knife

Notes
For the ideal light and fluffy texture, stick with either the food processor or mortar-and-pestle method described here. Trying to make the toum in a blender or with an immersion blender will result in a thin and dense texture closer to that of a mayonnaise or dressing than traditional toum.

If the emulsion breaks, it can easily be brought back together with the help of an egg white. Combine 1 egg white with 1/4 cup of the broken emulsion in the bowl of a food processor until fluffy. With the food processor running, slowly pour in the remaining broken emulsion.

Make-Ahead and Storage
Toum may be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 1 month.

Directions
Using a paring knife, split each garlic clove in half lengthwise. With the tip of the knife, remove the germ from each garlic clove half.
Food Processor Method: Place the de-germed garlic and kosher salt in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse garlic in short bursts until finely minced, occasionally removing the lid to scrape down the sides of the bowl with a flexible rubber spatula. Add 1 tablespoon lemon juice and continue processing until a paste begins to form. Add another tablespoon lemon juice and process until completely smooth and slightly fluffy.
With the food processor running, slowly drizzle in 1/2 cup oil in a very thin stream, followed by 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Repeat with another 1/2 cup oil and remaining 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Continue the process, alternating 1/2 cup oil and 1 tablespoon water, until all the oil and water have been incorporated. Transfer toum to a container and store in the fridge for up to 1 month.

After adding each half cup of oil, add spoonfuls of lemon juice and water. This prevents breaking the emulsion by not overcrowding the liquid phase with too many droplets of oil. Alternating oil and water will yield a fluffy, thick, and stable garlic sauce. Add more oil for a thicker and milder spread or garlic dip, less for a more pungent and free-flowing sauce.

How to Fix Toum When It Breaks
Sometimes, even when you’ve delicately drizzled in oil and patiently made your garlic paste, this fussy sauce still breaks—perhaps because the food processor overheated the toum, or the garlic was old and dry. Don’t worry, you can harness the emulsifying powers of an egg white to bring it back together. Combine one egg white with a quarter cup of the broken emulsion and process until fluffy before slowly pouring in the rest. Although this won’t be a traditional toum, it will be delicious and creamy.

Stocked with homemade toum, you’ll never be left to suffer the whims of miserly takeout portions or greedy partners again.S

How to Make Toum
This first step is to make a smooth and fluffy garlic paste. For the most flavorful toum, start with the freshest garlic: Pre-peeled cloves sold in bulk lose much of their pungency, while old, sprouting heads of garlic can be bitter and harsh. Look for firm, tight heads with no signs of bruising or sprouting.

After peeling the cloves, I split them in half lengthwise and remove the germ, as the little sprout in the center can leave a noticeable sharpness in raw applications. (Read my article on removing the garlic germ for a more in-depth explanation.)

Process the cloves in a food processor, along with kosher salt for added friction, until completely puréed. The garlic needs to be fully broken down in order for the proteins and stabilizers to be released from within its cell walls.

Once the garlic is smooth, blend in some fresh lemon juice. With mayo, all of the liquid can be added at the start because the egg is such a strong emulsifier. Because garlic is a weaker emulsifier, keeping the paste thick creates more drag on the oil droplets, helping to keep them apart.

Next, add oil very slowly, in a thin stream. Adding the oil too quickly will flip the emulsion inside out, dispersing water droplets into the oil and resulting in a greasy sauce, so it’s important to take it slow.

Thankfully, toum is pretty easy to make and stays fresh in the fridge for a month, so there’s no reason to not always have a surplus. Ever since realizing this, I’ve been able to focus on more important things during dinner—like constructing the perfect bite of shish tawook, charred onion, and pickles on my fork.

Toum is a staple of Lebanese cuisine, and more than just another condiment. This garlic sauce is great for stirring into soups and pasta, marinating chicken, and tossing with roasted vegetables; it adds an energetic punch of garlic to anything without requiring the hassle of peeling and mincing. It’s also a pungent vegan alternative to mayo and perks up any sandwich. Toum has become a staple in my fridge, and since it requires only four ingredients and a food processor to make, there’s nothing stopping you from also living beyond the limits of a few two-ounce containers.

What Is Toum?
Toum is essentially a mayonnaise, but it’s stabilized with garlic instead of egg. Just like mayo, toum is an emulsion of oil into water, made possible with the help of a third-party emulsifier.

An emulsion always involves two incompatible liquids brought together by dispersing one into tiny droplets suspended throughout the other. This can be done with vigorous shaking and agitation—like when you’re whisking oil into a vinaigrette—but without an emulsifier, the coupling is only temporary. Emulsifiers and stabilizers help droplets stay dispersed by coating each one and reducing the surface tension, preventing them from coalescing.

Mayo is a stable emulsion because the lecithin and proteins in an egg are some of the most powerful emulsifiers around. One egg is capable of emulsifying one gallon of oil, resulting in a stiff and spreadable sauce. A properly made toum will be just as thick, and densely packed with billions of oil droplets, but it’s all held together with the far less stable proteins and pulverized plant tissues of garlic. This makes bringing toum together a more delicate process than making mayo, but with some patience, you can avoid pitfalls.

A bold, creamy garlic sauce and dip, Lebanese toum is easy to make at home with the help of a food processor and a little good technique.
Blending garlic into a smooth paste releases emulsifiers contained within its cell walls, which stabilizes the sauce without using eggs.
Alternating the addition of oil with a small amount of lemon juice and water prevents the emulsion from becoming overwhelmed with oil and breaking.
Whenever my husband and I order delivery from our favorite Lebanese place, the center of the meal isn’t the chicken shawarma or the mixed grill for two—it’s the potent garlic sauce, toum. Despite my desperate messages for extra toum, they never pack more than three two-ounce containers of the stuff. I carefully ration the precious substance, but my husband mindlessly finishes his tub and a half and descends onto my share, leaving me forced to recalibrate each of my smears and paw hysterically at empty containers.