If you grew up in America, you probably have one of a few typical American opinions about mayonnaise.  Depending on your culture, tastes, upbringing, and food beliefs, you may think:

Mayonnaise?  On every sandwich please!

Please hold the mayo (even the thought of that stuff makes me sick!)

Well, I put it in tuna salad, but that’s about it.

Wouldn’t make a potato salad without it!

What the heck is IN that stuff, and why does it keep so long?

[People in my cultural group] wouldn’t go near that stuff with a ten foot pole.

That’s fattening, right?  I’d better buy the low-fat.

I don’t even think about it.  Mayo’s just a normal thing to have in my fridge.

Love it or hate it, though, you probably consider it “That white stuff that comes in a jar.”

Store-bought mayonnaise is pretty dreadful stuff.  There are some better types than others, made with simple ingredients, but most are a combination of bad oils, preservatives, and cheap fillers, mixed together to keep forever and taste like rancid nothingness. 

The worst (as with most, er, “food products”) are the “light” or low-fat mayonnaises.  These substitute simple, natural fats that aren’t bad for you with chemicals, sugars, and fillers that are.  Check out the ingredient list of Hellman’s Light Mayonnaise (sorry for the all-caps on these; their websites list them that way):

INGREDIENTS: WATER, SOYBEAN OIL, VINEGAR, MODIFIED CORN STARCH**, WHOLE EGGS AND EGG YOLKS, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP**, SALT, LEMON JUICE, XANTHAN GUM**, (SORBIC ACID**, CALCIUM DISODIUM EDTA) USED TO PROTECT QUALITY, PHOSPHORIC ACID**, DL ALPHA TOCOPHEROL ACETATE (VITAMIN E), BETA-CAROTENE**, CITRIC ACID**, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL** FLAVORS (SOY), PHYTONADIONE (VITAMIN K), PAPRIKA OLEORESIN.

**INGREDIENTS NOT IN MAYONNAISE.

So, to make it “light” they added corn starch, high fructose corn syrup, xanthan gum....  All various sugars and fillers.  This pretty much sums up the misguided American approach to nutrition. 

Check out the same list from Kraft Light Mayo:

WATER, SOYBEAN OIL, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, MODIFIED FOOD STARCH, VINEGAR, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF EGGS, SALT, EGG YOLKS, SUGAR, POTASSIUM SORBATE AND CALCIUM DISODIUM EDTA AS PRESERVATIVES, MUSTARD FLOUR, PHOSPHORIC ACID, LEMON JUICE CONCENTRATE, XANTHAN GUM, DRIED GARLIC, DRIED ONIONS, PAPRIKA, VITAMIN E ACETATE, SPICE, NATURAL FLAVOR, BETA CAROTENE (COLOR).

The biggest red flag here is that the eggs, lemon juice, mustard, and spices are less than 2% of the total ingredients.  That means this stuff is mostly water, soybean oil (which isn’t a very good quality oil), high fructose corn syrup (??!!), vinegar (the only of these ingredients I like), and modified food starch (I love when my ingredients start with ambiguous words like “modified” and when they assure me it’s a “food.”  As my wise friend Sandi once said, if you have to tell me it’s a food, it probably isn’t.) 

This is supposed to be good for you?  No wonder people think they don’t like health food.  Whoever gets away with labeling these things “light” and marketing them to people who genuinely want to be healthy ought to be thrown in jail.  With bears.  Bears who are hungry after a diet of sugar-free jello.

Lucky for us, there is a whole other world of mayonnaise out there just waiting to be explored.  Real mayonnaise is a subtle, thick, fresh sauce suitable for dipping, spreading, mixing into things, and, when nobody’s looking, licking out the last bits in the bowl.  For those of you mayonnaise-haters cringing out there, know that I’m someone who loathes store-bought mayonnaise with an unbridled passion, who would scrape it off the bread of my mayonnaise-infested sandwich with a scalpel if I had to, and who only ever used it for mixing tuna salad.  Homemade mayonnaise is an entirely different substance.

I had tried and failed to make homemade mayonnaise before.  It came out runny, it never emulsified, it was awful.  This time, I drew on the power of the Internet not only to produce a recipe, but to produce a video of an exuberant chef who would show me in person how to make very easy, very delicious mayonnaise.  I found a great video (it’s in French, but I’ll describe the concept below if you don’t speak French).  I modified the recipe to my own, but the concept is the same.  The ingredients are simple and inexpensive, except the saffron, but used sparingly, that’s inexpensive too.

Homemade mayonnaise

Ingredients:

- 1 egg yolk

1. -1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
   

2. -2 tablespoons lemon juice
   

3. -1/4 teaspoon salt
   

4. -1 heaping tablespoon mustard*
   

- 3/4 cup mild, fairly neutral oil.  (I combined unrefined canola, olive and walnut oils, which gave it an interesting flavor.  You can use hazelnut oil too.  Avoid unhealthy oils like corn, safflower, soy, or - worst of all - cottonseed)

1. -A pinch of saffron (This is optional, but I added it and really liked it.)
   

Note: some people use all vinegar, some people use all lemon juice.  Adjust to your tastes.

Tools:

Whisk (you can cheat like I did and use a whisk attachment on a hand mixer - it’s much easier)

Big bowl with a narrow bottom (not flat; this keeps the ingredients together)

A towel to hold the bowl still

Small pitcher, like a Pyrex measuring cup with a pour spout

Instructions:

Separate your egg and save the white for something else.  In a bowl, mix together the egg yolk, vinegar, lemon juice, salt, mustard, and optional saffron.  Whisk well.  Secure the bowl with a towel wrapped around it on the counter, because you’ll need both hands for the next step.

Dip vegetables (roasted or raw), use in salads, spread on bread, and be amazed what a different substance this is than that white stuff in the jar.  Please note, unlike the death-defying, preservative-laden stuff in your fridge door, this mayonnaise only keeps a few days.

*Thanks to Nicole for bringing me licorice mustard from France!