Make Your Own Mayo

Making your own mayonnaise may not be something that's ever crossed your mind.  I've always heard  it was better than what you could buy in the store, but so are homemade cookies, and quite frankly that has been a bigger draw to me than making my own mayonnaise.  But, I'm on an eating plan right now that doesn't allow cookies (darn it), but does allow mayonnaise, if you make it yourself from healthy ingredients.  I am a fan of that white creamy stuff and plenty of dishes that contain it in the ingredients list.  I'm thinking of potato salad, egg salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, and so on.  Those are all things that are usually banned from most diets.  And you mean I can have that and still lose weight?  Okay, I'm interested. 

The recipe I used came from this cookbook.  Actually, it's full of great recipes, and I may share some of those later on.  But for now, let me show you how easy it is to make your own mayonnaise from a few basic ingredients.  

Before I do that though, I pulled a jar of store bought mayo out of the fridge and looked at the ingredients list.  This is what I saw on the Kraft Light Mayo jar : water, soybean oil, modified food starch, vinegar, sugar, maltodextrin, salt, natural flavor (hmmm, wonder what that is?), eggs, mustard flour, lactic acid, potassium sorbate, phosphoric acid, dried onions, dried garlic, calcium disodium EDTA (I have no idea), beta carotene.  Even though I don't know what all those things are, I do know that they are listed in order by the amount of each ingredient in the finished product.  So, my store bought mayonnaise is mostly water.

My home made mayo has an egg, lemon juice, light olive oil, dry mustard and salt.  This small ingredients list is what gives it the thumbs up for my eating plan.  Healthy fats and a little seasoning.  That's it.  This can be made in a food processor or blender.  I used my blender, and it turned out beautifully... the second time.  Yeah, the first time didn't work so well, because I didn't fully follow the directions.  Making mayo, is like a science experiment. There's all kinds of science going on in that blender.  Things like emulsion and creating colloids was mentioned in the recipe.  Don't worry. You don't have to really understand it, but you do  have to follow the directions perfectly.  And here's the way it works.

Place the egg and 2 T. lemon juice in the food processor or blender.  The recipe called for bottled lemon juice, because of it's reliable acid content, but I didn't have any, so I used fresh lemon juice and it still worked beautifully.  Put the lid on the blender and forget about it for awhile.  (This is where I messed up. I was too anxious, or impatient.  Same thing I guess.)  Leave it for at least 30 minutes or up to a couple of hours.  

Add 1/4 cup of the olive oil,  1/2 t. dry mustard,

and 1/2 t. salt to the egg and lemon juice.   Blend until combined.

While the blender is running ( I put mine on a slow setting), very slowly, in a small stream, pour in the remaining cup of olive oil.  Patience is important here too, because it should take a couple of minutes to pour all of that oil in the blender.  Pretty soon, the blender will begin to make a new sound, one that means that your liquids have emsulified (I love sounding all scientific), and voila, you have mayonnaise. 

Condiments may not make the most beautiful food photography, but I think this is some lovely mayonnaise!  And it tastes amazing. Really, it is so much better than the stuff from the store.

This doesn't really feel like dieting to me.  

Now that I've mastered mayonnaise, I may have to try the recipe for BBQ sauce, hoison sauce, and ketchup, all yummy things that normally have a ton of sugar in them.  For now though, I'm sold on this mayo, and I think I will have to continue making it, even when the diet is over.   It's worth the effort.

I'll let you in on another thing I've discovered recently.  Coconut milk is a magic ingredient.  Whipped sweet potatoes with coconut milk and a few raisins is totally divine.  Replacing the cream that I would usually use in my butternut squash soup with coconut milk was a good idea too.  Perfectly legal on my diet.  I just love happy food discoveries.