Mayonnaise

Basically, homemade minipimer mayonnaise is a fucking miracle. From 200 mℓ of oil (US$0.18), an egg (AR$35 for half a dozen, US$0.15 per egg), 20 mℓ of lemon juice (AR$100 for 500 mℓ, I think, so US$0.10) and a pinch of salt (say US$0.01), you get about 300 g of mayonnaise customized to taste. Not counting depreciation on the minipimer and the 40 kJ of electrical energy, that’s 44¢, and the whole process takes under 4 minutes, including getting the ingredients out and washing the dishes. And the result keeps even without refrigeration, though beware of circumstances where it can get diluted with water, lowering the acidity and salinity to levels where bacteria and fungi can grow.

The recipe is, as explained in that Twisted Sister song, huevos con aceite y limón. In more detail:

Mayonnaise recipes

https://www.fifteenspatulas.com/homemade-mayonnaise/

• one egg
• .25 cups oil
• .5 tsp ground mustard
• .5 tsp salt 30 seconds add another cup of oil over 60-90 seconds
• 2 tbsp lemon juice

https://www.inspiredtaste.net/25943/homemade-mayonnaise-recipe/#itr-recipe-25943

• one large egg
• 1 tbsp dijon mustard
• 1 tbsp red or white wine vinegar
• .25 tsp kosher salt
• 240 mℓ (1 cup) oil (grapeseed, safflower, or canola)
• 1 tsp lemon juice

add oil incrementally while blending

https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/mayonnaise-241083

• one egg yolk
• ½ tsp dijon mustard
• ¾ cup oil
• 1 tsp wine or cider vinegar
• 1½ tsp lemon juice
• ¼ tsp white pepper

add oil incrementally while whisking; add the salt and pepper at the end

use room temperature eggs

http://dish.allrecipes.com/making-mayonnaise/

• two yolks from large eggs
• 2 tsp lemon juice or vinegar
• 1 cup oil (light olive, grapeseed, or canola)
• a pinch of salt

add oil incrementally while whisking

add the salt at the end

use room temperature eggs

don’t use bottled lemon juice

add more yolk on emulsification failure

for aioli add a very finely minced clove of garlic

maybe try tarragon (estragón)

http://www.cookingforengineers.com/recipe/43/Homemade-Mayonnaise

• 2 large egg yolks
• 3 tbsp lemon juice
• ¼ tsp salt
• pinch of white pepper
• 1 cup oil

whisk in oil drop by drop after whisking other components

freeze unused egg whites in ice cube trays

https://aseasyasapplepie.com/homemade-mayonnaise-30-seconds/

• 1 egg (cold)
• 200 g sunflower oil (cold)
• 2 tbsp vinegar or lemon juice
• ¼ tsp salt
• 1 tsp dijon mustard

warns not to break the yolk (!)

use an “immersion blender” and it’ll be easy; hold it still 10 seconds to get the emulsification started

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/12459-mayonnaise

• 1 large egg yolk
• 2 tsp lemon juice
• 1 tsp dijon mustard
• ¼ tsp kosher salt
• 1 tsp cold water
• ¾ cup oil (safflower or canola)

whisk slowly

slowly dribble in the oil

https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/eggs-recipes/my-beautiful-mayo/

• 2 egg yolks
• 1 heaped tsp dijon mustard
• 500 mℓ mixed oils
• 1–2 tbsp white wine vinegar
• ½ lemon
• sea salt

add oil slowly

add vinegar after most of the oil

Notes from my experience

Since noting the above, I’ve made mayonnaise about 20 times. My experiences:

• With a 600-watt minipimer (“immersion blender”) there is very little you can do to keep the mayonnaise from emulsifying properly in less than a minute; I managed to do it once by not having enough egg in there, so I added another egg.
• This is true regardless of how much or how little oil you are including or how warm or cold anything is.
• Alioli — aioli in French — is fucking amazing. Including a clove of raw garlic — without bothering to mince it, because the minipimer takes care of that — makes a magical gel of deliciousness that can be applied to any food.
• Lower-power minipimers are less reliable at emulsification and much slower, so if you’re using one of those you may actually need to wait to add some of the oil. You still don’t need to do the thing where you carefully add the oil in a tiny trickle to keep it from separating out, which apparently you do have to do if you’re mixing it with a fork or a whisk. The longer time probably produces more wear and tear on the minipimer.
• A bit of raw onion in the mayonnaise instead of garlic produces a result very much like sour cream with onion.
• Both vinegar and bottled lemon juice are fine, but I like the flavor of the lemon juice a bit better.
• The mayonnaise thus made separates a bit over the course of a few days if not eaten first, forming a sort of hardened grease on the top and up the sides of the mixing bowl.
• I’ve been using bargain-basement sunflower/soy oil mix (AR$33 per 900 mℓ last time I bought it, although then US$1 was AR$41, and now US$1 is AR$45) and can’t tell the difference from pure sunflower oil.

I’m using cut-off bottoms of Coke bottles as mixing bowls. These are somewhat annoying to actually get the mayonnaise out of, because of the five smallish projections around the bottom, but I suspect those help a bit with the mixing part, by virtue of allowing the minipimer to spin very close to the bottom without actually touching it. Miraculously, neither of the minipimers I’ve used for this so far have the geometry to cut up the bottle bottom.

Minipimers are also much easier to wash than whisks are; you stick the end of the minipimer into a bowl of water and turn it on. The emulsion nature of mayonnaise helps here, dispersing the oil in small micelles. The PET of the Coke bottle is somewhat less accommodating; although the oil doesn’t soak into it the way it does with polyethylene and polypropylene, really getting it off the plastic requires copious detergent and hard work with a sponge. Fortunately, this is unnecessary if you just rinse the mixing bowl with water and then make more mayonnaise in it as soon as you run out.

So far I haven’t gotten salmonella from my homemade mayonnaise. Wikipedia tells me that large salmonella outbreaks in mayonnaise are invariably associated with inadequate acidity, with pH of 5 or even 6, while pH in the 3.6 to 4.1 range prevents spoilage. Unfortunately I don’t have litmus paper handy, so I don’t know what the pH of my mayonnaise is, and I don’t carefully measure the acid as I add it.

You can turn the mayonnaise into a super lazy egg salad by adding a couple of boiled eggs, and optionally black or white pepper and a slice of raw onion, and chopping for just two to ten seconds with the same minipimer before washing it. If you have the eggs boiled beforehand, this is an excellent antidote to the urge for expensive convenience food.

Failed mayonnaise rescue by defecation

A couple of times using an underpowered minipimer I’ve failed to get the mayonnaise to mayon at first. In each case, after failing to solve the problem by adding more egg yolks, I let it sit covered in the fridge for an hour or two, and a substantial amount of bright yellow oil separated at the top; after pouring this off, it was relatively easy to get the less-oily remainder to gel, and it could then assimilate the oil that had been poured off. I suspect that what’s happening is that the egg is being reduced to separated droplets floating in the oil, and further stirring is not effective at getting them to join up, though perhaps it makes them smaller, and certainly it keeps them from settling.

This process of separating immiscible liquids, or a liquid and a solid, by allowing the heavier one to settle out, is known as “decantation” or “defecation”. Do not attempt to instead separate the mayonnaise after digesting it.

Presumably the aqueous phase of a successful mayonnaise is continuous, and that is the difference; I don’t know if its oil phase is discontinuous, separated into droplets, or if the two phases form interpenetrating open-cell foams. The aqueous phase of the failed mayonnaises is definitely discontinuous, though, because tiny droplets of it remain suspended in the oil after it separates.

Is it healthy?

Aside from the concerns about salmonella, mayonnaise has a lot of calories; it’s more than 70% pure fat. Eating fat is probably good for you (the late-20th-century conventional wisdom to the contrary has been shown to be false) but eating calorically dense foods is not. So it should be used as an ingredient in a more diverse food, such as a salad, not eaten by itself. Commercial mayonnaise is unappetizing enough that you have to be Michael Hart (peace be upon his blessed soul) to eat it by itself, but this stuff is tasty enough that I'm at risk of just eating it with a spoon.

If you’re eating a low-carbohydrate diet, perhaps a ketogenic diet, maybe you shouldn’t eat commercial mayonnaise, because it invariably contains modified food starch as a thickener. But real mayonnaise, made from egg, oil, and either lemon juice or vinegar, contains only traces of carbohydrates; lemon juice is about 6% carbohydrates (according to the bottle I have here) and the mayonnaise is about 5% lemon juice, so each 100 g of mayonnaise might contain 300 mg of carbohydrates from the lemon juice.