Green “garlic bread” sauce.
I am not going to wang on for ages about this, but I do feel the need to write it down and share it. It is a sauce recipe I took from Fergus Henderson's book “Nose to tail eating”, but one which I changed a lot, as I barely had half the ingredients as my kitchen is tiny and I am not a restaurant.
Since I made so much of it I have had large quantities left over and I really can’t stop eating it. I made this sauce on Monday to go with with some Merguez sausages and I am so in love with it that I have eaten it at least twice every day since (now Thursday). If I could have sex with it, I definitely would.
It is not a particularly revelatory idea, and nor is it particularly exciting, but it is incredibly intense and more morish than I could clearly cope with. Each of the ingredients included brings out the intensity of the other, but whilst also numbing some of the more harsh or unpleasant tones. In short, it is greater than the sum of its parts.
I have eaten it as a side sauce for cooked green vegetables, including fine green beans and also savoy cabbage fried with onions and chicory. I’ve also had it with a breakfast of fried eggs, wilted spinach and bacon. It goes well with fish too and especially with meat. If you chose to use a blender, it will also be much thicker like a pesto and, therefore, suitable for pasta. Especially pasta snail shells which will scoop up the sauce. But also just spread on toast or sliced into a baguette and roasted in the oven with parmesan to make garlic bread. It is truly a vers sauce.
Ingredients
- 1–2 bunches of parsley
- 1 bunch of chives
- 6+ cloves of garlic
- 1 tin of anchovies and some of the oil
- 1 handful of capers
- Splash of white wine vinegar
- Olive oil.
Method
There are two different ways to blend this. If you are using it more as a dressing and you want a runnier sauce, add more olive oil and don’t use a blender. You will need to chop everything very finely. This will give you a much more liquid sauce, which can be more suitable to salad dressings or just for your preference.
The way I did it was with a blender, as I wanted a thicker sauce, more akin to a green ketchup than a salad dressing. There really isn’t anythig else to write here than just to blend it. You will end up with a green sauce with the consistency of a more liquid pesto, but not quite ketchup. You can eat this straight away, but it will be a much more bitter and intense flavour than if you leave it. The more I have eaten it through the week, the more I’ve grown to enjoy it. The sweetness and more subtle flavours of the garlic have come through. I can only describe it as a kind of garlic bread sauce.
I have found it has gone well, with literally everything. As I described above.
So yeah, do enjoy the garlic burps.
Sam
