What Is Toum? Lebanese Garlic Sauce, Explained

Toum is a Lebanese garlic sauce. That much every menu tells you. What almost nothing tells you is the fact that explains everything else about it: toum has no egg in it. No egg, no dairy, no starch, no stabiliser of any kind. It is a thick white emulsion held together by the garlic itself.

Once you know that, every strange thing about toum stops being strange — why it is so ferociously garlicky, why it breaks if you look at it wrong, why it is white and whipped instead of yellow and heavy, and why we put yuzu in ours. This is the explanation, and then what we serve it with.

What is in toum

Four things. Garlic, salt, neutral oil, and an acid — classically lemon juice. That is the entire ingredient list of a traditional toum. There is no fifth thing.

The finished sauce is opaque, matte white, and stiff enough to hold a peak. If you have only met garlic sauce as the thin drizzle that comes with a shawarma, a proper toum is a surprise: it has the body of whipped butter and it is intensely, uncompromisingly hot with raw garlic.

The one fact that explains the rest: the garlic is doing two jobs

An emulsion is oil suspended in water, or the other way round, kept from separating by a third substance that is comfortable with both. In mayonnaise that third substance is egg yolk. In hollandaise it is egg yolk again. In a vinaigrette that holds, it is usually mustard.

Toum has none of those. What it has is garlic, which is unusually good at the job — its cell walls carry proteins and polysaccharides that behave, once the clove is broken down to a paste, very much like an emulsifier.

Here is the consequence, and it is the thing worth taking away from this post. In mayonnaise, flavour and structure are on separate dials. You can add more garlic to a mayonnaise and it simply gets more garlicky; the egg is still holding it together. In toum there is only one dial. The garlic is the flavour and the garlic is the structure, so you cannot make a milder toum by using less garlic. Use less garlic and you do not get a gentler sauce — you get a broken one, a puddle of oil with some garlic in it.

That is why toum is always aggressive. It is not a stylistic choice by Lebanese cooks. It is arithmetic.

Which is also why it breaks

A single emulsifier working at its limit has no margin. Toum breaks if the oil goes in too fast, if the garlic is old and has lost water, if the mixture warms up, or if the ratio drifts. Home cooks who have had a toum split three times running usually conclude they are doing something wrong. Mostly they are doing everything right and simply running the emulsifier past what it can carry.

The principle, if you want to try it: break the garlic and salt down to a genuinely smooth paste before any oil goes near it, then add the oil in a thread rather than a stream, alternating with small additions of the acid. The salt is not only seasoning — it draws water out of the garlic, and that water is half of what the emulsion is made of. We are not going to print our own ratios here; every kitchen’s toum is a slightly different animal and ours is the kitchen’s.

Toum, aioli, mayonnaise and tahini sauce

These four get used interchangeably on menus and they are four different things.

Toum — garlic, oil, salt, acid. No egg. Emulsified by the garlic. White, stiff, very strong.
Aioli — in its oldest Provençal and Catalan form, also garlic and oil with no egg, and therefore a close cousin. In almost every modern restaurant, and probably in the jar in your fridge, it is mayonnaise with garlic in it.
Mayonnaise — egg yolk, oil, acid. Emulsified by the yolk. Pale yellow, soft, mild.
Tahini sauce — sesame paste loosened with water and lemon. Not an emulsion in the same sense at all; it thickens as you add water, which is the single most counter-intuitive thing in Middle Eastern cooking. Different sauce, different job, and it is the one that goes on the hummus, not the chicken.

If a dish arrives with a “garlic aioli” that is soft, yellowish and mild, it is garlic mayonnaise. That is not a criticism. It is just not toum, and if you were expecting toum you will be disappointed by something that is perfectly good at being what it is.

Why we put yuzu in ours

Our version is on the menu as garlic-yuzu toum, and the substitution is narrower than it sounds.

The classic recipe already needs an acid, and the acid is not decoration — it sharpens the garlic, and it helps the emulsion hold. Lemon fills that slot by default. Yuzu fills the same slot: it is sour in the same range, it does the same structural work, and it brings an aromatic top note — floral, faintly bitter, closer to grapefruit and mandarin than to lemon — that lemon does not have.

So we did not add a Japanese ingredient to a Lebanese sauce. We changed which citrus goes into a slot the recipe already had. That distinction matters, because it is the difference between a fusion dish that works and one that is wearing a hat. The same logic runs through most of this menu, and it is set out at length in what to order at a Japanese-Middle Eastern place.

What it tastes like in practice: the yuzu lifts the top of the sauce and makes the garlic read as bright rather than only hot, which matters a great deal when the thing next to it has spent three quarters of an hour over live coals.

What we serve it with

One dish. The menu prints it as LEBANESE CHARCOAL CHICKEN, with a subline in parentheses reading (45MINS OF LOVING), and the description: spatchcocked, green harissa, garlic-yuzu toum, sidewinder chips.

Three things on that plate are doing distinct jobs and it is worth knowing which is which before you start dunking indiscriminately. The green harissa is the herbal, chilli-forward one — it goes on the meat. The toum is the sharp, garlicky one — it goes on everything, and it is the reason the chips are there. The chicken is spatchcocked, which is to say flattened so that the whole bird cooks at one thickness over the fire instead of drying out at the edges while the thigh catches up.

We are not going to make the case for charcoal here — that is a whole subject of its own, and the skewers-and-charcoal side of the menu covers the fire in more detail. The point for this post is narrower: a rich, smoky, forty-five-minute bird needs something acidic and raw next to it, and a sauce whose only ingredients are garlic, oil, salt and citrus is about as direct an answer to that as a kitchen can give.

How to actually eat it

Put toum on the chips first. It is the fastest way to calibrate how strong the batch is, and toum does vary batch to batch for the reasons described above. Then use it on the meat in smaller quantities than you think you want. It is a seasoning with the texture of a dip, and treating it like a dip is how people end up unable to taste the chicken.

Leftover toum on the plate is not a waste. Ask for pita. It is on the mezze section at a piece a time and it comes off the same charcoal.

Two practical notes

It is not subtle, and that is not a fault. If raw garlic is a problem for you — and for some people it genuinely is, digestively rather than as a matter of taste — say so when you order. The menu asks in its own words that you let us know if you have any dietary restrictions or food allergies, and this is exactly the kind of thing it means.

On dietary lines: a classic toum contains no egg, no dairy and no animal product at all, which makes it one of the few restaurant sauces that is vegan by construction rather than by substitution. It is served here alongside chicken, so it does not make the plate anything. And to answer the question the rest of the menu raises: Habibi-san is not halal — we serve pork and we run a full bar. That, and the other things people ask before booking, are set out in our FAQ.

If you are coming for it

The chicken takes forty-five minutes, which the menu is entirely upfront about, so order it early in the meal rather than as an afterthought. Start with something from the mezze while it cooks. The full menu is here, the gallery shows the room and the fire, and you can book a table for Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, at 29 Hamilton Road in Jalan Besar.

For the wider context — where a place like this sits among everything else worth eating in the city — there is our full guide to Japanese food in Singapore, and the dish-by-dish version if you would rather learn the vocabulary first.