Basil Garlic Sauce with Lemon

---

---

Full recipe

We often cook sauces because they help to open up, even mundane dishes, with a new side. So you may have read on our website recipes for cream sauce for fish, plum sauce for meat or a narrowly tailored sauce for shawarma.

There are also universal toppings that go well with all types of dishes: meat, fish, salads, and vegetables. One such “universal fighter” was Tzatziki, and in this recipe we will make a garlic-basil sauce.

The uniqueness of the sauce with basil and garlic is its simplicity in ingredients and cooking process. Therefore, do not delay and proceed directly to the preparation. The basis of the sauce will be homemade yogurt. Cooked on starter, it always has a creamy flavor and thick texture. Exactly what we need!

For the sauce, it is better to take the yogurt cool, so I use it right after the ripening stage in the fridge. If you are making the sauce from the store version, it is advisable to take white natural yogurt without preservatives and thickeners. More often than not, it will already be tepid because it is stored in the refrigerator.

Yogurt (200 g) pour into the bowl of a blender. You can also use an immersion blender, but this way you can not always achieve complete homogeneity. Now peel the garlic (4 cloves), cut off the tough bits and put it to the yogurt. If the cloves are large, it is better to put a few and then add the garlic to your liking.

The sauce should be tangy and flavorful, but a large amount of garlic will block out the creaminess.

If the garlic has sprouted, you can cut off the green sprouts, but I will tell you honestly that their presence does not affect the taste in any way.

Fact

As the name implies, the second important ingredient is basil (6 g). In my case, it’s red, but no one’s stopping you from using green. By the way, the color of the basil changes the final color of the sauce slightly, so if this is important to you, buy or pluck the right color greens right away. For 200 grams of yogurt, I took about 10 leaves of different sizes.

Next, squeeze out 1 tsp. of lemon or lime juice. The most effective way to do this is with a bar squeezer. I also recommend rolling the citrus well with your hand on the table before squeezing the juice. This way we can get more liquid.

When all the ingredients are in the bowl of the blender, add a pinch of salt and black pepper. Whisk the garlic and basil sauce well until smooth.

Taste, and if necessary, add spices. Since our family likes spicy toppings, we can add up to ½ tsp of freshly ground pepper mix.

The finished sauce is moderately liquid. The consistency corresponds to the classic dip in which pieces of meat or fish are dipped. It tastes like a nice balance of garlic, basil and yogurt. If desired, the sauce can be dressed with a vegetable salad, without pronounced acidic ingredients.

Bon appetit! Don’t starve 😋