MAYO Mayo - Make Your Own Mayo

Ingredients for your Mayonnaise

On the weekend, my other company Artisan Bleu was swamped to prepare a special tea party for a family reunion event to celebrate their English and Scottish heritages. One of the item we prepared was Coronation Chicken Finger Sandwich. Everyone was raving about how delicious it was and asked where the egg yolk flavour came from. I was more than happy to share the secret is the most simple ingredient - a real mayonnaise.

Mayonnaise, one of the most popular condiment in our food. We use it on salad, sandwich, French fries. Until I learnt how to make it myself, I was so used to grab a bottle and just go with it. I never questioned how real mayonnaise supposed to taste because I thought it was an industrial product from USA. And OMG how wrong I was! It is one of the base sauce in French cuisine. With it French have created a series of derivative sauces such as Remoulade, Aioli, Tartar sauce. Every professional chefs master their skills in making this basic French sauce.

From nutrition and health perspectives, making your own sauce always help you to minimise intake of food chemicals and maximise actual nutritions you can obtain from natural ingredients. Just a quick look at the supermarket mayonnaise label and it contains:

Manufactured Mayonnaise Ingredients

Water, Oil, vinegar, corn starch, sugar, salt, egg (1.5%), cream powder, citrus fiber, guar gum, xanthan gum, mustard flour, lemon juice concentrate, calcium disodium, natural mustard flavouring, paprika extract, more oil.... In fact the basic recipe of mayo only requires egg, oil, lemon juice and salt. And it's something you can do it in 2 mins.

So if you are ready to give a go to a natural option of mayonnaise instead of artificial chemical overloaded one, go get a salad bowl (glass or stainless steel) and a whisk. Or even better a hand-held electric whisk, then follow this recipe and method:

To make 250ml of Mayonnaise:

Ingredients

1 egg yolk

250ml Light flavoured oil such as vegetable oil, sunflower oil etc

15ml lemon juice

salt

cayenne pepper (optional)

Method:

1. In a bowl, add egg yolk, half of lemon juice and a bit of salt and whisk until you can see the egg yolk starts to thicken and turn pale yellow then very slowly add the oil and keep whisking until oil is all in. If you don't have a steady hand to pour to oil in slowly, just add one spoonful at a time. As you keep whisking, you should be able to see the oil fully incorporated and your sauce is getting thicker and thicker.

2. Adjust your flavour with lemon juice and salt, and you can add a bit of cayenne pepper to more depth of flavour.

If you use an electric whisk, it's almost impossible to fail as the speed of the whisk is so fast that it will break down the oil particles quickly and allow them to incorporate into the egg protein easily. However if you are like me, enjoy using some arm and shoulder muscle with hand whisk, then there is a chance your mayo splits along the way so instead of a nice thick creamy sauce, it's a pool of liquid. This is mostly caused by you add your oil too fast. But no worries, you can fix it by either add 1-2 tsp of hot water and add a bit of your split mayo and whisk together to thicken it. Once it is thicken, then you can gradually add the rest of the batch in. Remember go very slow. Alternatively, add another yolk and mix with a bit of the split mayo, whisk them together until they are thicken, then add the rest of split sauce gradually.

One last bit it's because this recipes contain raw egg yolk, for those concern of salmonella or have children at home, you can buy pasteurised eggs or pasteurised egg yolk for this recipes.

You can keep your mayonnaise in a sterile jar and store them in fridge for up to 1 week.

Happy whisking!