Kitchen challenges: Homemade mayo

Granted, mayonnaise is cheap and readily available in today's day and age. (It's also more stable: once opened, commercial mayo will keep in the fridge for 6 months, whereas Bon Appetit recommends only keeping homemade mayo for 3-4 days.)

But there are still some reasons to make homemade mayonnaise. My personal reason was that, in an effort to expunge all sources of sugar in my life, I realized that commercial mayo contains sugar. And reportedly, homemade mayonnaise is way better than the commercial stuff. So I was willing to give it a shot.

Mayonnaise is an emulsion in which the fat globules are suspended inside a foamy matrix of egg protein. If this sounds complicated, it kind of is. It can be tricky to make mayo by hand: you have to whip the eggs steadily (but not too much) while drizzling in small amounts of oil at a time until the emulsion forms. If you do it wrong, the mayo will "break," meaning that it will separate into a puddle of oil and eggy stuff.

Regardless of what recipe you use, you should always use room temperature eggs. This is a critical item for success.

I used the New York Times recipe which calls for egg yolks, a small amount of water (which helps the emulsion stabilize), lemon juice, mustard, salt, and oil. I used 100% olive oil which turned out to be a mistake: the flavor was way too strong. (It also gave my mayo an off-putting greenish hue. Strictly a cosmetic problem, but still.) Next time I would try a 70/30 blend of neutral oil (like canola) and olive oil.

I would also use a little bit less lemon. Mine turned out way too lemony, which might be because I used fresh-squeezed juice. (The bottled stuff tends to be less vibrant.)

As for the process, it wasn't too bad. Although I only have two hands, and I was using both of them for the egg beater, so I wasn't able to drizzle the oil in while whisking. Next time I would try using a blender. But overall, even though my mayo was a little bit odd, it definitely showed promise. I'm cautiously optimistic about homemade mayo.

Image courtesy Flickr/Stacy Spensley