Mad for mayo
Homemade mayonnaise makes summer even better. Plus Paris Olympics kick-off and beach/airplane reading for cooks.
Joyeux vendredi, cuisinier/cuisinière sportif/sportive ! Happy Friday, sporty cook!
The day is here! Opening ceremony!
I’ll need to watch the replay later, as I’m TV-free, in one of my happiest places, with my dear friends Mikie and Dan in San Luis Obispo.
Mikie and Dan know how to enjoy life. Case in point: We had mayo for breakfast. Not only mayo, of course; the mayo made an appearance in a fabulous breakfast sandwich Dan concocted: soft-scrambled eggs, tomatoes from their garden, wonderful thick-cut bacon and a schmear of mayo, on Dan’s incomparable homemade sourdough.
I didn’t get a good shot of it; just gobbled it up.
Not surprisingly, Dan is also a master of BLTs. In fact, we bounced around the idea of opening a restaurant that serves only BLTs and G+Ts — since they go so well together, and Mikie is a G+T master. (What should we serve outside of tomato and G+T season, in the winter? Any ideas?)
Anyway, the roundabout point I’m trying to get to is that mayo makes life better.
Corollary: Best Foods/Hellman’s is great; homemade mayo is even greater.
Apparently, I’m not the only one with mayo on the brain: In the past year, the recipe that got the greatest number of hits at Cooks Without Borders (the big site) was Homemade Mayonnaise. In fact, the only other page that got more hits was a story about Brussels sprouts that the The New York Times linked to.
Surprising, right?! Here’s the recipe so many sought:
To me, the best mayos include olive oil, especially a great olive oil, which lends mayo wonderful depth of flavor. If you want to use 100% olive oil in your mayo, the above recipe is the one for you.
My favorite way to approach mayo-making, though, is to employ an immersion-blender hack. Building a mayo in the stick-blender’s jar is a cinch — and practically fool-proof. The thing is, for some complicated molecular reason that only J. Kenji López-Alt can understand, the immersion blender hack doesn’t always work if you use olive oil; sometimes the olive oil will cause the mayo to break. My compromise: Use the immersion blender for the trickiest part — to establish the emulsion (again, a snap), and then hand-whisk in some great olive oil. Unlike Serious Eats, which uses whole eggs in its recipe, I prefer just egg yolks, the classic French way. Here’s that recipe:
Besides starring in an out-of-this-world BLT, how else can homemade mayo improve your summer? You can use it in tuna salad you make with really good tinned tuna in olive oil, or in the dressing for a Shrimp Louie.