Bread Skordalia

Bread Skordalia actually convinced me that I needed a Greek cookbook, and I needed it fast. In May, we spent a week on Kos, a fairly touristical island just off the Turkish coast. We were lucky that at that time there were very few tourists other than us, and that we found two very nice restaurants that didn't specifically cater to tourists (you know, not the ones with posters outside featuring photos of hamburgers, hot dogs and the like, advertised in at least three different languages). One of the two nice places we found was a fish restaurant just outside the harbour, and it was so good (and cheap) that we went there every other day. We'd usually just ask what fish was fresh, and what else they'd recommend to go with that. On our very last day, they served us skordalia, and we were enraptured.

This version of skordalia is very good, and very similar to the one we had in Kos. It was a tad thick, but that might have been my fault as I used ground almonds and therefore didn't know how much I needed to add exactly. Also I found that for some reason, our small kitchen machine wasn't able to chop the garlic, therefore I would suggest chopping it by hand.

Skordalia has a very strong garlic flavour; see it as a Greek version of garlic mayonnaise. I would recommend making only half a recipe, that should be enough for whatever you are eating. We served it with Patates Lemonata (oven-fried potatoes), plain fried fish and Greek Village Salad, a very nice combination.

Edited 20 May 2017: 1/2 cup almonds is about 75 g in weight. I have no idea how many ground almonds we used last time, but my guess is that we used more than that. Having used whole almonds this time, I would actually recommend using ground almonds, as at least in our case the kitchen machine didn't grind the almonds very fine (or DH stopped the machine too soon, which I doubt).

15 cloves garlic might be a little too much, depending on the size of your cloves; start out with a little less. Also consider that garlic tends to become stronger in flavour if you let it sit for a while, e.g. if you prepare the skordalia in advance. We are considering using roasted garlic in addition to raw to mitigate the sharpness of the garlic.