Blender Mayonnaise

Julia Child gives us a recipe for making mayonnaise in the blender, but that doesn't mean she approves of it. She goes so far as to say "no culinary skill whatsoever enters into its preparation." Ouch! Despite this admonition, I still almost burnt out the engine on my blender and ultimately switched to finishing it with the hand mixer, so I'm not sure what that says about me.

I tried it in the blender, not because I am avoiding achieving mastery of the egg yolk. On the contrary, I want very much to lord over the egg yolk. But after my most recent debacle with the "I Know How to Cook" mayo recipe, my friend Lala suggested I try it in the blender and that it is just a snap. I thought I might as well give it a shot so that I could at least disdain it as "too easy" with the same authority as Julia. Sigh.

Assemble the Players:

1 whole egg
1/4 tsp dry mustard
1/2 tsp salt
1 Tb lemon juice or wine vinegar (I opted for vinegar)
1 cup olive oil or vegetable oil (I used olive oil)

Break the egg into the blender jar. Add the mustard and salt. Cover and blend at top speed for 30 seconds, or until the mixture is thick and foamy. 

 

Pour in the lemon juice or vinegar, and blend for 10 seconds.

Take the center lid out and pour the oil into it, while blending at high speed. Be sure to pour the oil in slowly in a very thin stream of droplets. I use this ketchup dispenser with a very narrow nose that I got at the 99¢ store.

 

Supposedly the sauce will begin to thicken after about 1/2 cup of the oil has been added. However, after about 1/4 cup my blender started to smell and make unpleasant sounds, and when I took it off it looked like this:

 

This didn't seem like a good thing. So I poured it into a bowl, crossed my fingers that a hybrid technique would work and plugged in the hand mixture. After about 30 minutes of gentle coaxing and painstakingly slow oil addition and eventually raising to top speed the sauce began to thicken. Ultimately it wasn't quite as thick as I would want, and I didn't need to take any of the recommended  thinning measures, but it was mayonnaise nonetheless. 

 

I am often perplexed as to why such seemingly simple tasks elude me, but it looks like I am going to stick with the original method and hope for the day when mastery is achieved and I can whip this up in 10 minutes as Julia promises.

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.

Mayonnaise

According to Ms. Julia Child, "Mayonnaise...is a process of forcing eggs to absorb a fatty substance, oil in this case, and to hold it in thick and creamy suspension." I don't know exactly why, but I love that and now that I have made mayo, it makes the process make perfect sense.

Julia says that you can make mayonnaise one of two ways.
1. With a wisk or an electric hand mixer
2. with a blender.

"Blender mayonnaise uses a whole egg rather than egg yolks; it is almost automatic and no culinary skill whatsoever enters into its preparation."

"Mayonnaise made by hand or with an electric beater requires familiarity with egg yolks... and you should be able to make it by hand as part of your general mastery of the egg yolk."

Well I certainly couldn't handle the shame that making blender mayonnainse would have rained down on Some Assembly Required, so I opted for the electric hand mixer, and embarked on achieving my general mastery of the egg yolk.

Temperature:
Everything needs to be at room temperature. Julia suggests warming the mixing bowl with hot water before beginning to take a chill off.

3 egg yolks
1 Tablespoon Wine Vinegar of Lemon Juice (I used white wine vinegar)
1/2 teaspoon spalt
1/4 teaspoon dry or prepared mustard (I don't know what she means by "prepared mustard" I used dijon.)
11/2 - 21/4 cups olive oil, salad oil or a mixture of both. If you are a novice, use the minimum amount. (I did not read this novice advice until just now. It would have made the process shorter and easier. I used almost 2 cups of oil)
2 tablespoons of boiling water.

Add the egg yolks to a 3 quart mixing bowl and beat for 1-2 minutes until they are thick and sticky.

Add the vinegar or lemon juice, salt and mustard. Beat for 30 seconds more.

The egg yolks are now ready to receive the oil. The oil must be added very slowly drop by drop. (I used condiment dispensers with a very tiny opening. I got them at the 99¢ store.) You must not stop beating until the sauce has thickened. (This is why I think that the electric mixer is a much better choice than the whisk unless you are trying to develop your Popeye forearms) Stop pouring and continue beating every 10 seconds or so, to be sure the egg yolks are absorbing the oil. After 1/3 cup to 1/2 cup of oil has been incorporated, the sauce will thicken into a very heavy cream and the crisis is over. (Crisis?!)  Beat in the remaining oil by 1 to 2 tablespoon dollops, blending thoroughly after each addition. (I just squirted larger amounts from the ketchup dispenser)

When the sauce becomes too thick and stiff, beat in drops of vinegar or lemon juice to thin it out. Then continue with the oil.

Beat the 2 Tablespoons of boiling water into the sauce. This is an anti-curdling insurance. (I forgot this step and it was fine. Now curdling disaster, so no insurance needed.)

Season to taste.