We ate dinner on the back porch four times last week — partly because I've been making aioli.

Essentially, aioli is raw garlic pounded into a paste with a little salt and a couple egg yolks, with just enough olive oil beaten in to make it creamy. It is delicious, in an aromatic, breathtaking way that is best appreciated outdoors.

On its home turf in the south of France, aioli is the quintessential summer sauce and the centerpiece of street fairs which, as Richard Olney relates in "Simple French Food," often culminate in aioli monstre — "the entire population turning out to pile plates high with boiled salt cod, potatoes, carrots, green beans, artichokes, chickpeas, beets, hard-boiled eggs, snails, squid stew and huge globs of garlic mayonnaise."

While everything Olney describes sounds delicious, it got me thinking: If I were to make a monster aioli, what would it be like?

Delicious visions danced through my head: Meats, seafood, vegetables — what wouldn't go well with a really good aioli?

But before I could play with any monster menus, I had to learn to master aioli-making.

I've been making aioli for years, and every once in a while, everything would work.

Pound the garlic to a paste in my granite mortar. Smear in egg yolks with the pestle. Stir in oil and lemon juice. Voila: a golden, creamy mayonnaise, sweet and pungent from garlic with fruitiness from the olive oil.

More often, though, about halfway through, I'd wind up with badly scrambled eggs. The mayonnaise would "break," the eggs and the oil separating into a greasy mess. The only cure was the blender: Whip up a whole egg, then slowly pour the broken mayonnaise into it, a sure-fire fix.

But the blender beats in so much air that the aioli is pale and fluffy rather than golden and creamy.

So I pulled out my most reliable cookbooks, made up a little spreadsheet and broke down the recipes into the amounts of garlic, egg, oil and lemon, then compared them.

What I found was that few experts agree on anything.

Judy Rodgers, in "The Zuni Cafe Cookbook," makes aioli with one or two cloves of garlic; Anne Willan, in "French Regional Cooking," uses six to eight.

Thomas Keller, in his "Bouchon" cookbook, uses garlic roasted in olive oil, rather than raw. Some call for fruity olive oil, some call for mild. In the "Chez Panisse Cafe Cookbook," Alice Waters calls for a mixture.

Some add the lemon juice at the beginning, some at the end. Waters and Rodgers don't use lemon juice at all.

Clearly the secret to a good aioli isn't in some specific formula of ingredients. And if it isn't the ingredients, that means it must be the technique.

After half a dozen experiments, I learned that my problem was not somebody else's recipe, but my own impatience: I was adding the oil too quickly.

Aioli, like mayonnaise, is an emulsion of two antagonistic ingredients: oil and water (from the garlic and yolks). In creating any emulsion, the early stages are trickiest, when the union is at its most fragile.

Because of all that garlic, this is even truer of aioli than mayonnaise. While I can whip up a decent mayonnaise without much thought by beating in a thin stream of oil until it thickens, with aioli you have to proceed a drop at a time at the beginning.

Unfortunately, it seems to be impossible to quantify exactly how much oil to add for two egg yolks. The amount always seemed to vary, so the recipe is for a range. Pay attention to the texture and use your judgment.

Though aioli tastes so good you may be tempted to try to keep it in the refrigerator as a staple, don't. After half a day, the garlic flavor turns metallic. If you must refrigerate it, let it only be for a couple of hours and then bring it back to room temperature before serving. Chilled, the olive oil thickens and stiffens the mayonnaise.

Having solved the riddle of aioli, I moved on to my monster menu.

I experimented with meats, fish and vegetables. What I found is that there are few things that can't be improved by a good garlic mayonnaise.

I love hard-boiled eggs with aioli, and also steamed tiny potatoes. The same with fat asparagus spears and green beans. Remember to cook them to the point that they're still a little crisp — that's the best texture for a creamy sauce like aioli.

Arrange the food on a platter and feel free to eat with your fingers, dipping eggs and vegetables into the fragrant mayonnaise.

The French aren't real big on grilling, but Americans certainly are. I found there's nothing that brings out the sweetness in aioli like a whiff of wood smoke — artichokes, briefly blanched then grilled over oak wood; flank steak, crusty on the outside and still juicy and rare in the center.

What to drink? I found the only thing that really worked was ice-cold rose.