Homemade Mayonnaise

Encouraged by our recent experiments with butter and mozzarella, we decided to make some homemade mayonnaise. I’ve never been a huge fan of mayonnaise, but I’ve been enjoying it a little more than I used to. I’ve mixed all kinds of ingredients with it to balance out various sandwiches and burgers, and I started wondering if I’d like mayonnaise more if I could adjust the flavor, as was suggested in this Bon Appetit column. Well, we rolled up our sleeves and decided to try our hand at making a better mayonnaise than Mr. Hellman and Mrs. Duke. We based our recipe on this one, but dialed down the mustard and vinegar a bit.

Believe it or not, this is everything you need.

Here’s the lemon juice, egg, mustard and vinegar mixture before the oil is added:

Here’s the mixture after 1/4 cup of oil is added. It’s still a little yellow, but it’s starting to look like mayonnaise:

My arm got exhausted after stirring the whisk for about five minutes, so my wife stepped in to stir while I drizzled in the last 1/4 cup of oil. She’s moving so fast that the picture is just a blur:

Here’s the finished product. You can see that the color faded a little after all of the oil was incorporated:

It’s obviously going to taste good on a sandwich where it’s just a minor flavor, but we wondered if it would it be good as a star of the show. So I decided to make a new potato salad based loosely on this recipe.

If necessity is the mother of all invention, then inventory is the father of creative dishes. We didn’t have everything in that recipe, so we mixed our homemade mayonnaise with a little sour cream, heavy whipping cream, white wine and herbs from the garden (chives, dill and a little parsley), and used it to dress some steamed new potatoes and asparagus spears:

We chilled it all for a while, and it came out really good:

remodeling our kitchen, so we made large dishes of broccoli/cheese/rice/chicken casserole, hash brown casserole and spaghetti and meatballs. Out of all those great comfort foods, this potato salad was our favorite meal. Next time I’ll mince some capers to get that briny taste that pickles usually bring to potato salad, chop up some red onion for added flavor and texture, and use champagne instead of white wine to flavor the mayonnaise mixture. That should round the dish out perfectly.

If we make mayonnaise again, I’ll do it in the stand mixer or food processor. Still, even with the manual stirring, this mayonnaise was easy to make and we couldn’t be happier with the results. Maybe next time we have guests over I’ll jazz it up with some garlic and herbs and call it aioli. That’s what so many restaurants are starting to do these days.