365DOP: Mayonnaise

Cross-posted from 365 Days of Peta

There was a definite shortage of ingredients in the house on Sunday, which is not very Peta-like at all I feel. However, the lack of exciting fresh ingredients did give me the opportunity to whip together my very first mayonnaise.

In my limited experience as spectator, I have always considered mayonnaise-making to be tricky, time-consuming, and liable to kill one's arm from endless whisking. HOWEVER. Peta has given me the Power of Mayonnaise!

My first attempt was a dismal failure. Instead of finding the mayonnaise recipe in the book (not hard to find FYI), I tried to use the aïoli recipe on page 145.

I discovered that It is not possible to make mayonnaise from this recipe. After a good fifteen minutes of desperate beating, I had nothing but a sad thin oily-eggy soup and a realisation that the two methods are QUITE different and that I had wasted a whole lot of perfectly good oil.

On the other hand, using this recipe introduced me to the idea of using an electric eggbeater to make the sauce.* When I successfully executed my wobbly eggy deliciousness (using the recipe from Haddock Fumé au Pain Perdu, p.29 - which doesn't mention the eggbeater FYI) the electric beater had saved my arm from falling off. Also, a moment please to thank the Boy for executing one of the most perfect "thin streams" of olive oil ever witnessed by Culinary Man.

There was a bit of mucking around to get some more flavour in the mayo - extra mustard, salt, lemon juice and lots and lots of herbs. I'm not sure what this says: was the recipe not that good? Was it my ingredients or the quantities in which I used them? Has my mayo-palate been ruined over the years by Best Foods? Is it a matter of the recipe dating - that is, the ingredient balance staying on the mild side while palates get more adventurous?

Since I now have the Power of Mayonnaise, I feel confident that mayonnaise flavour is something I will be able to perfect in future. In the meantime, I will buy some Dijon mustard. Peta likes Dijon mustard, and I suspect it's my Dijon-less-state that may have caused my flavourless mayo.

*Peta lists the mayo and the aïoli under "sauces" in the index, but doesn't if feel strange to call mayonnaise a sauce?