Mayonnaise, heated


I keep needing mayonnaise but only a little here and there. If the mayonnaise is cooked then it can be kept longer. This is an experiment to make mayonnaise just from the egg whites, not the yolks, and see what happens. 

Whisking the egg white creates meringue obviously, this meringue of two jumbo-size eggs will take up 1 cup of vegetable oil. 

Actually, I don't care that much for plain pure white mayonnaise so even I were to buy a jar of it I'd alter the flavor with garlic, ginger, cayenne, honey, and most of all, mustard. I'd change the whole jar. So I'm putting those things in this except in powder form this time. So aioli then, and not mayonnaise, but they do have the same start. Plus rice vinegar. 


Makeshift double boiler. Egg whites from two jumbo eggs. Yolks reserved. 




Vegetable oil drizzled in by the drop at first, slowly increasing to a steady thin stream to one full cup. Two egg whites absorbed one full cup vegetable oil. Is that amazing or what? 

It tastes fine, but it is an ugly white without the powder ingredients and even uglier white with the powder ingredients. I do not like the color. It tastes fine. It tastes better than regular mayonnaise, but it has color issues. Color and tone and value and reflectivity issues. It looks like goop. 


The impulse is to whisk the egg yolks directly into the finished white mayonnaise if only to give it some color. Instead, I added the finished white mayonnaise to the egg yolks incrementally as if making a fresh batch. This is the same way a broken mayonnaise is corrected. It doesn't make a difference since this mayonnaise will thicken by being cooked to 145. 




1 comment:

Rob said...

Though it's certainly a departure from classical technique, use of an immersion blender and the associated mixing cup yields an emulsion that's much more stable than can be achieved with a whisk. You put all the ingredients in the mixing cup, start the blender at the bottom of the cup and pull it up through the ingredients. Magic, and the electricity used is so minimal that it would be grudging of the planet to complain.

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