My refrigerator's condiment shelf is a true mess. I may not be Marie Kondo, but I firmly believe that each jar, squeeze bottle, and tube holds a special place and brings real joy. Among the chaos, my bottle of Kewpie coexists with a 64-ounce jar of Best Foods. There are always about eight bottles of chili crisp around, along with Fly by Jing's chili crisp vinaigrette. Fancy mustards rub shoulders with not-so-fancy ones, and there's a bottle of Son fish sauce because I read that it's one of author Andrea Nguyen's favorites. The usual suspects like ketchup, barbecue sauce, and Frank's Red Hot are also present.

An Order of Rotisserie Chicken with Zankou Chicken's Famous Garlic Sauce

Toum, like hummus, refers to both the ingredient and the dip. Toum means garlic in Arabic, and hummus means chickpeas. It's a dip typically made with garlic, oil, salt, and lemon, processed or pummeled until it becomes a smooth, white paste. Once confined to restaurants serving Levantine cuisines, now you can find toum at Trader Joe's, Costco, and even in your local Target's refrigerator section."For sure Zankou had a huge role in all the groceries and restaurants adding garlic sauce," says Vartkes Iskenderian, whose grandparents founded Zankou in 1962 with a tiny storefront in Lebanon. "How much of a role we'll never know, but I know when we did it, nobody knew what toum was."The Iskenderians started selling raw and rotisserie chickens out of a small deli in Bourj Hammoud. At some point, his grandmother Markrid started making and selling toum along with the chickens."The garlic, the chicken, everything was cleaned and done in our home kitchen upstairs from the shop," Iskenderian says. "When they started serving the chicken and garlic sauce together, it was a huge hit. If you ask people in that neighborhood today where the Zankou was, they can still tell you."Over the last 40 years, the dip has become synonymous with the Zankou Chicken name. Iskenderian estimates that the 13 locations in Southern California go through more than 1 million pounds of the sauce in a year. The recipe is the same one Markrid made in her home in Lebanon and is now prepared at a 16,000-square-foot kitchen facility in Vernon.Each batch starts with cloves of garlic from Christopher Ranch in Gilroy. There are seven full-time team members who inspect each clove of garlic for blemishes and trim or discard as needed. The facility goes through more than 400,000 pounds of garlic a year.Iskenderian is tight-lipped about the ingredients but says there are surprisingly few in the recipe. It's all run through a food processor and transported in large tubs via refrigerated trucks to the various locations.Though Zankou Chicken contributed to the proliferation of toum in Southern California during the 1980s and 90s, the dip can be found all over the Levant."It's very difficult to pinpoint the origin of dishes in the Levant given that it was once part of the Ottoman Empire," says chef and author Anissa Helou, who specializes in foods of the region. "What is for sure is that it's more ubiquitous in Lebanon."It's typically served with shish tawook (grilled chicken), chicken wings, and chicken shawarma. At restaurants in the mountains of Lebanon, Helou says it's common to find a dish of tomato adorned with sumac and toum. And on the streets of Tripoli in the north, there are spicy fish sandwiches served on pita bread smeared with toum.Helou's Lebanese mother, 92, still makes toum by hand using a wooden mortar and pestle dedicated for this specific task."It's basically garlic, salt, olive or vegetable oil and citric acid in restaurants and lemon juice in homes," she says. "It takes an enormous amount of oil to get that fluffy consistency. The garlic paste emulsifies with the oil to become the dip the whole world loves."

The Toum at Kismet Rotisserie

At Kismet Rotisserie, Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson's rotisserie chicken restaurants in Los Angeles, each order of chicken is served with garlic sauce. Along with a few containers from Zankou, I usually have a side or two of the Kismet toum in the fridge. Every time I visit the restaurant, I order a handful of sides to go.The Kismet version is lighter and looser than what you'll find at the grocery store or Zankou. It has a consistency that's more of a puree than a paste. The garlic punch is rounded rather than sharp, and there's a nice hit of citrus."It's shocking how much people like it," Kramer says. "Historically there has been an aversion to strong garlic, but people actually love it."The chefs blanch half the garlic in their recipe (shared in their new cookbook) for a few minutes before adding it to a blender with raw garlic cloves, salt, lemon juice, oil, and instant mashed potatoes. Cooking the garlic helps mellow its bite, while the potatoes act as a stabilizer for the emulsification.

Toum in Everyday Cooking

Toum is a year-round fixture at my house. During the holidays, the quantity seems to triple. It's the condiment that enhances any meat or bowl of bland mashed potatoes on the table. I type this without a specific family member's mashed potatoes in mind, of course.For years, it's been a part of Times restaurant critic Bill Addison's Thanksgiving tradition. Each year, he and friends who are like family to him prepare a turkey in the style of shawarma djej (chicken)."My best friend is Lebanese," says Addison. "For the bird's marinade, we go heavy on the lemon and garlic and a mix of seasonings inspired by baharat, or Lebanese seven spices, which includes cumin, cinnamon, and lots of black pepper. Sometimes we make both toum and gravy. We might skip the gravy, but never the toum."Beyond the holiday table, I find myself adding it to fried rice, noodles, and roasted vegetables. It's my favorite thing to spread on bread, any sandwich, or burger."It makes you kind of a social leper after you eat it," Helou says with a laugh. "You can't eat toum every day if you're seeing people because your breath will be disgusting."Ah, maybe that's why I'm still single.