Mayonnaise

Mayonnaise, aside from being the tiniest bit tricky to spell (is it two 's's or two 'n's?), is an incredibly simple ingredient to make. Yes, yes, I know I always say that, but that's because I'm focusing on making simple things right now. There are some things that make people nervous about mayonnaise: it involves a lot of whisking, and there is a potential for it to break.

When a sauce breaks, and mayonnaise is essentially a sauce, it means that whatever is attempting to bind everything together fails to bind, either because you've put too much in, or you've stirred too much and overworked the binding agent, or you've gone too fast. In the case of a mayonnaise, your big concern is adding oil to quickly, especially at the beginning.

The ingredient list is short and easy to memorize. You have 1 egg yolk, 1 cup of oil, 1 tablespoon of acid (lemon juice, lime juice, vinegar, etc), 1 double-teaspoon of dijon mustard (okay, 2 teaspoons of dijon mustard. Though I might try it with 1 teaspoon at some point just to make the recipe that much easier), and some salt. Because just about everything should have salt.

First, put the egg yolk, acid, and mustard into a bowl.

Whisk to combine. Well, I say whisk, but I am lazy and never really built up the whisking habit. I know, I know, I'm weak, but really, hand mixers are awfully easy to use, and not really any harder to clean than a whisk. If you are making enough mayonnaise, you could even use a stand mixer, but I find that the whisk doesn't quite get low enough on my stand mixer to work well with just one yolk. Your mixture should look something like this:

Next, add the oil slowly. No, more slowly. Just a tiny little bit at a time to start. Don't be impatient; this is 5 minutes of work, you can stand to take the time to do it right. Seriously, it's the only way to go wrong on this recipe, just do a couple of drops of oil, whisk/mix to combine, and repeat until the mixture starts looking a little more like mayonnaise than mustard. At that point, you can switch to a small but steady stream of oil. Once you've used up your oil, stir in a pinch of salt.

And this is probably the trickiest step, all things considered, because you need a stable bowl, you need to hold the whisk/mixer, and you need to drizzle in the oil. If you're using a stand mixer, you have do troubles. If you have a helper to drizzle or mix, even better. But if you need the bowl to be steady, wrap a heavy dish towel around the base of the bowl, and maybe put it on some sort of silicone trivet or similar. That should keep things steady. You also want to test your oil container to ensure that it pours well. This measuring cup:

did a poor job of pouring. The oil kept running down the outer edge of the cup to the bottom, and it made me sad. So test out whatever you plan to use and ensure that it drizzles slowly without being annoying.

Okay, if you rushed through the oil addition, and your mayonnaise breaks, you have two options. The first is to throw everything out and start again. It's a bit wasteful, but there are minimal ingredients, and they don't cost all that much. If you don't like that idea, then start again with the mustard, egg yolk, and acid, then get your emulsion going (which is the step where it starts looking more like mayonnaise than mustard). You could then add in what you did the first step, and potentially have a double batch of mayonnaise, or just a really rich batch with just the one cup of oil instead of two.

Now, all that being said, I really haven't broken mayonnaise before, and if you're careful, you won't either. Don't fret over it, I only include the above paragraph so you'll know you have options if you need them. Which you won't.

When you're all done, your mayonnaise will look like this:

which, yes, looks much like mayonnaise. Surprise! The cool things about making your own mayonnaise are the usual: you know where it comes from, no strange ingredients, you can customize to your heart's content, and bragging rights. Plus, as long as you have vinegar, mustard, oil, and eggs, you never need run out of mayonnaise.

Customization options include:

• Changing the oil. As a base, use any neutrally flavored oil. But you can sub out the last 1/8 cup, give or take, for something else. Sesame oil, chile oil, extra virgin olive oil, basil-infused oil, and so on. Don't use a really high speed on the mixer at this point, especially with olive oil, because it doesn't respond well to harsh treatment;

• Changing the acid. I mentioned earlier that you can use whatever you want here. Different flavor acids will give you different flavored mayonnaise, as you would expect. Lemon juice, lime juice, moscatel vinegar, apple cider vinegar, and so on;

• Changing the mustard. You get the idea.

Once you have the mayo, you can use it immediately or store it for about a week. Perhaps in some sort of mason jar. (If there were an A Year From Scratch drinking game, and there should be, you would have to take two sips at this point.)

Aside from making tasty sandwiches, your real benefit to homemade mayonnaise is in recipes where mayonnaise plays more of a starring role. Potato salads, deviled eggs, and the like. Also, there are a number of sauces that use mayonnaise as their base. Customization of those sauces generally include "Mix in this herb or sauce to the mayonnaise. Serve." And considering the mayonnaise only took about 10 minutes to make, that's a pretty easy sauce, all things considered.

Comments

[Amy]

A few more tips? Make sure the egg yolk is at room temperature. You will have much better luck with the emulsification! A cold egg can give you trouble. Also if you use a stick blender you don't need to slowly drizzle the oil.

[Ben]

Having the ingredients at room temperature is a good tip for pretty much anything involving eggs, especially cakes and meringue. And now you've got me wondering why.

[Brian]

Agreed on the room temperature, Amy. I completely forgot to mention. I wrote an article for Fine Cooking about ingredient temperatures, but the general idea is that the oil will be tending towards a solid phase rather than a liquid phase the colder it is, and a cold egg will help the oil try to be more solid than liquid. That will slow things down. Not as much as of a problem as it would be with butter or something that tended to be solid at room temperature or just below, but it does interfere with the molecular movement.

I didn't go with the stick blender or the regular blender because there are those who believe that blenders are too hard on the ingredients and will affect the taste negatively. I don't make so much mayonnaise that I have a firm opinion on the subject, but I figured I'd go the safe route to start with.

Those of you making mayonnaise, please feel free to choose the route that you like the best.

[Ben]

Herve This, who's word I typically take as gospel, says that if you're making mayo in a food processor (or with an immersion blender) you'll have a more oily taste. His reasoning is that you have more small oil droplets, so more oil surface area then when you have the larger droplets that you get as a result of hand wisking or wisking with an electric beater.

But I'm with Brian in that I've never sat down and make mayo four different ways with different instruments to test.