Monday, February 1, 2010

Mayonnaise Disaster

Pride goeth before a fall. Yesterday I attempted to make mayonnaise again. This time I used the recipe from "I Know How to Cook" instead of Julia Childs strict and fussy instructions, with all her hysterical warnings of averting crises. The IKHTC recipe was simple and straight forward with fewer steps and alarums. I was certain that, like her ridiculously labor-intensive roast chicken recipe, Julia was just being excessively gourmet and French with these instructions.

Well I couldn't have been more wrong. First of all Julia's recipe calls for three egg yolks, IKHTC calls for just one. I thought this was great because the whole process would go that much more quickly. IKHTC said to beat the yolk in a large bowl, so i used my large stainless steel mixing bowl. Way, way too big for one egg yolk. So the yolk was spread all over the base of the bowl, making it very had to get a sense of how it was coming together as I added the oil. Julia also has you add mustard and vinegar before starting with the oil to aid in the emulsification process and to "prepare the egg yolk to receive the oil". IKHTC just has you jump right in, adding the vinegar at the end, and no mustard at all. I think if I had added vinegar and mustard to the one egg yolk it would have helped the too large bowl thing at least a little bit. Anyway, there I was mixing the thin layer of egg and oil with my electric hand mixer and it seem to be thickening up just fine, I'd probably added about 1/4 cup of oil, so I guess I got over-confident and started adding the oil a little more quickly, all of the sudden the whole thing seemed to fall apart. It just stopped thickening, and lost all thick, emulsifiedness it seemed to have before. No matter how much mixing I did, nothing worked, it remained thin and liquidy and would begin to separate as soon as I stopped mixing. I ran for Mastering the Art of French Cooking, as I remembered Julia having some advice for just such disasters. She said if you added a tablespoon of mustard to a 1/4 cup of unemulsified mayonnaise and mixed heartily it would fix it right up. She said this always works. Since I have decided not to doubt her methods anymore I am going to assume she means always if you follow her instructions from the begining... it did not work for me at all. Now I had an oily, eggy, mustardy liquid in a bowl.

At this point I decided this batch was not to be rescued, but wasn't quite ready to just throw it all down the drain. So I opened a can of tuna and dumped it in. It actually was a pretty tasty, but rather wet mess, so I added one more can of tuna and chopped up some celery, carrots and scallions and that absorbed enough to make it a rather nice tuna salad that I mixed with a bunch of greens and had for lunch. So all was not lost. However, I now know that I have not achieved mastery of the egg yolk and am not in a position to take such a cavalier attitude toward  the making of mayonnaise and I don't plan to veer from Julia's well laid course again for a good while.

1 comment:

  1. A) Mayonnaise ALWAYS opens the door for disaster. I have such mixed feelings about it as a condiment.

    B) "oily, eggy, mustardy liquid in a bowl." I think I need to lie down.

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