This may sound complicated, but it’s actually quite simple and is emphatically worth it.

I had intended for this update to hit the website last night, but what was supposed to be a quick errand rapidly turned into the great file cabinet debacle of ’08. It’s a harrowing tale of love, loss, a file cabinet and a missing coupon; but that’s a story for another time.

As a quick aside, I’d like to show you what a story in the Wall Street Journal can do for a website:

It was an amazing thrill seeing such a massive spike in my traffic. Thank you Mr. Gomes, and thank you Ms. Blymire. Now, on to this week’s update.

I had an ulterior motive for making this recipe. I was running low on chicken stock, and one of the benefits of boiling a chicken is the fact that when you are done, you have also managed to make chicken stock as well. Into my stock pot went a free range chicken, carrots, celery, leeks, an onion, a head of garlic, a bouquet garni and some peppercorns.

The pot was filled with water, dropped on my biggest burner and left for a while until the water was boiling …

… which turned out to be exactly an hour later. I quickly skimmed all of the scum from the top of the stock and took the pot off the heat. Per Mr. Henderson’s instructions, I placed the lid on the pot, and waited for it to cool down to almost room temperature. Since I knew it was going to take a while for that to happen, I began working on the aioli.

Aioli often seems to be mistaken for a garlic mayonnaise, but this is not so. Aioli is aioli and eating it should be an emotional experience–it is strong, but that is its role in life. Purist would disagree, but I find a food processor very useful here; the final consistency seems to hold together better. The instructions assume you will, too, but if you prefer there is always the mortar and pestle. Of course, if you don’t have a food processor, all you need to remember is mash your garlic well and add your oil gently. Purist may also disagree about the inclusion of eggs. Sorry.

As you can see, I happily yielded to Mr. Henderson’s gentle prodding to use a food processor to make the aioli. The thought of my arm falling off trying to make it using a mortar and pestle was too much to bear. To begin, I placed a grand total of twenty cloves of garlic and a pinch of salt and pepper into the food processor.

I whizzed the cloves until they were a pulpy mess, and then added a few egg yolks to begin the emulsion process.

Slowly, I dripped extra virgin olive oil onto the spinning blades of the processor. After adding roughly half a cup, the aioli began to take form.

More and more extra virgin olive oil was added until I had about two and a half cups of aioli, which was then tweaked with lemon juice. Now, my first instinct was to taste and see if salt needed to be added. I should have paid closer attention to the “emotional experience” part in the description. Folks, anything that has twenty raw cloves of garlic in it is going to be unbelievably powerful. With only a little taste, my mouth was on fire and I was dancing around the kitchen. Imagine dumping a pepper shaker into your mouth, and then swallowing. It was pretty darn close to that. Once I had regained my composure, I stuck the aioli in the fridge.

With only a little bit longer to wait until the stock and chicken had sufficiently cooled, I trimmed, cleaned and chopped the remaining leeks needed for the recipe.

At this point, I removed my boiled chicken and strained my cooled chicken stock. Some was placed in another pot with the leeks and brought to boil. After about eight minutes, the leeks were perfectly soft. The chicken was placed back in the stock pot with the remaining chicken stock and simmered until the meat had warmed up. This provided me with a perfectly moist bird.

Here are all of the elements–chicken, leeks, chicken stock and aioli–together in the plated dish. Mr. Henderson notes that with any unbrined, boiled meat it is a good idea to add a bit of coarse sea salt to heighten the flavor. I applied a quick dusting of salt and dug in. Right now, a few hours after eating this, I can still taste a lingering hint of aioli in my mouth. It’s a very important component of the dish though, as both the chicken and the leeks have a very nice, but very muted flavor to them even with the salt. Without the aioli, this would be a fairly unremarkable dish; but with it, the entire thing just explodes with a garlicy, peppery flavor. I’d have to agree, this was “emphatically worth it.”

One down, one hundred and ten to go.