Cool Tip: Failure is the Father of Invention (or How I Learned to Make Foolproof Mayonnaise)...

Jun 13, 2016

Have you ever made (or wanted to make) mayonnaise? It’s not that hard and the results are way better than store-bought, but it can be finicky. The other evening we were cooking with good friends and an amazing hamachi recipe called for yuzu aioli. Well I had abandoned my old blender in favor of a Vitamix, which I usually love...but not this time. I tried twice and couldn’t make an aioli that held together. The dish turned out great anyway, but that night I lay in bed googling “making mayonnaise with a Vitamix”, hoping I wasn’t the only one who failed miserably at the task. It turns out a Vitamix is extra challenging for making mayonnaise for two reasons: 1) it heats up and therefore can break your mayonnaise pretty easily, and 2) the blades don’t quite reach the bottom, so if you’re making a 1 egg yolk mayonnaise, the blades pretty much just fan the egg yolk, rather than mixing it.

So this brought me to the question: if you want to make only a small amount of mayonnaise, what’s the easiest way to do it. Again, Google provided the answer by leading me to a post by Healthie Foodie. The answer is an immersion blender and the process couldn’t be easier. And as a bonus, you use the whole egg, so you get the benefit of the protein in the egg white, while still having a delicious mayonnaise.

Here’s how you do it:

Put one whole egg, the juice of one half a lemon (or other acidic citrus), a teaspoon of salt, and 1 cup of neutral oil (we use the Mediterranean Blend from Costco that has olive, grapeseed and canola oils), and any additional flavorings you might want (e.g. garlic, mustard) in a jar that is large enough to fit the head of your immersion blender, all of the ingredients, and has some room to spare.

Wait about a minute to let the egg settle to the bottom of the jar.

Put the immersion blender all the way down in the jar and turn it on. Leave it there for about 20 seconds, or until you see the oil start to emulsify and “climb” the sides of the jar.