Egg-Free Aioli

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Aioli is a lime and garlic flavored mayonnaise and is frequently found on restaurant menus as a topping or drizzle over all kinds of savory dishes. 

At our house my kids will stand around in the kitchen and go through and entire loaf of French bread smeared with aioli while they talk. But recently my youngest has developed an allergy to eggs. This sent me to the internet to see what the answer was. 

Not surprisingly, there was lots of advice. Most of the places were creating a vegan mayonnaise. That wasn’t my goal, but if it was also vegan… cool. Nothing I made tasted awful because really, it’s garlic, lime and salt… how can you go wrong? 

There was lots of information about Toum, a Lebanese garlic sauce. This is made with just garlic, lemon juice, salt and oil. I made some and it is delicious. It is creamy, but not really the consistency of Aioli. I can definitely see using it as a spread or dip on all sorts of things. 

I continued in my search by trying an avocado option.  This one used an avocado, lime, garlic, and salt. This was advertised as being healthier because it only used 2 tablespoons of oil. The avocado provides the creaminess. Also not the kind of emulsion I look for in Aioil, but quite yummy. Some of my taste testers preferred the flavor of this one, but I kept searching for the right texture. 


My next to attempts used aquafaba. This is the liquid you pour off a can of chickpeas (garbanzo beans) before you use them.  I tried it with aquafaba, egg, lime juice, garlic, salt and ground mustard. Also a second recipe which adds cider vinegar and Dijon mustard instead of ground mustard powder. Both of these recipes had a texture very similar to aioli. Their flavors were good but different. 

My last try was with Soy Lecithin. I tried to use it without any milk, with regular milk and finally with soy milk. It emulsified the ingredients, but it was more of a dressing type of blend and nothing like a mayonnaise. It seemed like such a good idea, but even as a sauce, the mixture had a weird mouth coating feel. It was really a hard no. 

The clear winner here is the aquafaba. This was a recipe I found on the internet. It was quite good. The vinegar makes it a little more tart than my usual aioli. I need to do a little more work with the aquafaba before I’m ready with my own recipe, but I’ll let you know. 

The advantage of using aquafaba is that you get aioli and hummus!! Hard to beat! 


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