Matt Rourke/Associated Press

Ed’s approach to allioli is the same as mine - use a blender. The one time a tried a mortar and pestle I nearly passed out. - MB

The typical accompaniment to a rice dish cooked in a paella is allioli. This is not to be confused with its French near-homonym, aïoli, which is basically garlicked mayonnaise. The Catalan allioli is garlic and oil and salt – no egg yolk except when there is – crushed and stirred in a mortar until a fragile emulsion is formed. It is more akin to a Cuban mojo than to anything French, but it doesn’t contain citrus juice.

Many of the Spanish/Catalan rice dishes I’ve been tinkering with have been full of pork fat and the spices that go into sausages of various kinds and have been so in-your-face flavorful that I haven’t thought to remind you that a bowl of allioli is a nice thing to have to hand. The other day, however, I needed to make a purely vegetarian rice – artichokes, green beans, young fennel, onions, peppers – and found that allioli was no longer optional: even with a nice sofrito and a tasty vegetable stock, the dish needed an extra jolt.

I’m generally ready for laborious manual kitchen tasks – knife-chopping meat; shelling peas; whisking mayonnaise; shredding flank steak to make ropa vieja: sign me up. But mortars and pestles are just not my style. So I put three big, juicy, oily cloves of this season’s garlic into a container along with half a cup of olive oil and a big pinch of salt, and I obliterated this with an immersion blender, forming an emulsion that lasted longer than the eight nanoseconds that a mortar-and-pestle alloli tends to hold, at least when I try to make it.

This, Jackie and I and our guests drizzled over our no-pork-fat “paella,” to great effect.

Epilogue: There was some left over, and the next night we spooned it onto the taken-out remains of an imperfect pizza we couldn’t or wouldn’t finish in an East Village restaurant a few nights earlier. I won’t say that the allioli turned it into the best reheated pizza we’d ever tasted, but it certainly moved it up a point and a half on a zero-to-ten scale. I could also see it drizzled over lots of other things too: grilled meat or fish; roasted vegetables. Just about anything not involving caramel sauce and whipped cream, in fact.