For my first recipe I’m publishing the one concoction I use most of all: Mayonnaise. If you have a food processor, this recipe is so simple and so easy that you’ll wonder why you ever bought mayonnaise. This will make about a cup and a quarter of tasty spread and if you keep it in a covered glass jar in the refrigerator it will last for several weeks…although it never lasts that long around here.
There are a few quirks to this. If you use conventional supermarket eggs, you may find you need 2 eggs. Whatever nasty stuff they feed the chickens in those factory farms seems to lower the egg’s thickening ability. The higher quality the egg, the deeper the color. If you use one of my free-range pastured eggs, the resulting mayonnaise will almost be orange. Also, you cannot use Canola Oil. For whatever reason, Canola Oil just doesn’t seem to thicken. (GMO, hmm?) The oil I like best is Sunflower as it adds no taste of its own. If you love Olive Oil, feel free to use it but know it will add a distinct olive taste to the mayonnaise.
- One free-range organic egg
- pinch of salt
- 1/2 tsp prepared mustard (choose your flavor)
- 1/2 tbsp either fresh lemon juice or apple cider vinegar
- 1 cup Sunflower Oil
Using the steel processing blade, place the egg, salt, mustard and acid (lemon juice or vinegar) into the bowl of your food processor. Add about 1/4 cup of the oil. Pulse several times to mix the ingredients. Then, with the food processor running, slowly drizzle in the remaining oil. The slower you drizzle, the thicker the resulting mayonnaise.
Sunflower oil…does olive oil work or does it have to be sunflower?
If you like the taste of olive oil, it works great. But it makes the mayonnaise taste really strong and that wouldn’t work well if you were using it something light, like a dressing for coleslaw. Safflower oil would also probably work great as it’s pretty neutral in flavor.
Grapeseed oil works really well too, as does avocado oil (if you want to go a bit gourmet – that stuff is a tad expensive),
Thanks for your comment! I’ve tried both and found they work well. Ultimately, the sunflower oil is cheaper and never adds a taste of its own to the egg and mustard. This is really noticeable when it’s made with olive oil. That said, I’ll use olive oil if I’m serving mayonnaise with artichokes. That’s pretty tasty. I’ve recently switched to unheated sunflower oil and that’s been the best experience yet. The one thing I recommend everyone avoid is conventional canola/rape seed oil. (Well, there are actually a lot of non-organic foods I would recommend people avoid.) It absolutely refuses to thicken. I believe this is because rape seed oil is both genetically modified and saturated with Roundup. My guess is that together they prevent the egg from congealing.