One of my quests since the early days of this blog has been how to make mayonnaise when the grid goes down. How was I going to whip the eggs and oil enough to emulsify them into mayonnaise? I didn’t have any luck with my hand crank egg beater. (I have since learned that there are much better ones on the market, but I have no experience with them, so I can’t comment.) I bought some kind of rolling blender thing that claimed to make fabulous smoothies, thinking that might work. It was a disaster. I had concluded that if I didn’t have electricity, I wasn’t going to be able to make mayonnaise. But I still hoped.
About a month ago, I came across a recipe for eggless mayonnaise using aquafaba as the egg substitute. We already know how fabulous aquafaba (the liquid from a can of garbanzo beans) is. It makes fabulous chocolate mousse, Cool Whip, and a perfect egg substitute. Could it actually be used for making mayonnaise as well? I had to find out.
I used both my original homemade mayonnaise recipe as well as the recipe I came across promoting the use of aquafaba instead of eggs.
And both failed!
So I further researched the topic. Some people said you absolutely had to use a stick blender—regular blenders wouldn’t emulsify well enough to make a thick mayonnaise. I didn’t like that answer. But I had no choice but to try it out.
Our stick blender died a few years back and I never replaced it. However, for the sake of making eggless mayo, I had to have one. So off to Amazon.
It finally arrived last week.
I made two batches of mayonnaise using the aquafaba, one using my homemade recipe that I posted over three years ago and the other using the recipe calling for aquafaba (don't know where I found it now). Both turned out fabulous. Beautiful. Perfect. Unless your mayo has to have a tinge of yellow to it. Then they sadly fail at that. Without the egg yolk, they don’t have that bit of coloring. Instead, the mayo is perfectly white.
The link for my homemade mayonnaise recipe is posted below. Like I said, both recipes turned out well. They have slightly different ingredients, so you can try both and see which you like better.
Eggless Mayonnaise
1/4 cup aquafaba
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
1/4 teaspoon mustard
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup vegetable oil (I used peanut oil)
Combine first five ingredients in a wide mouth pint jar using an immersion blender. When ingredients are well mixed, stream oil into the mixture in a very thin stream with the blender going. (This should take about 2 minutes—very thin stream.) Continue to blend until mixture reaches the desired consistency. It will thicken more when chilled in the refrigerator.
Why is making eggless mayonnaise so important? I’ve come up with a few reasons:
- It’s always good to have options.
- We can make mayo when the chickens aren’t laying.
- Even if the hens are laying, we can save the eggs for those occasions where we have to have real eggs—like for scrambled eggs or eggs sunny side up.
- We lessen the risk of food poisoning due to salmonella from
using raw chicken eggs, including making potato or macaroni salads for picnics.
And yes, you can simply pasteurize the eggs before making the mayo, but really,
using aquafaba is so much easier.
Family reviews:
Everybody (Professor Belle, KOTPE, Buttercup, Blueberry Girl, Ellie, and Aaron) said
it tasted just fine in their sandwiches. No one here goes around just
eating mayonnaise. Ellie didn't like that it was missing that tinge of
yellow. Blueberry Girl liked that it was pure white.
Links to related posts:
Aquafaba—What It Is and Why You Want It
28 may 2022
How about using turmeric for the yellow color if you just have to have it
ReplyDeleteInteresting about the aquafaba. Good to know. Maybe I should start using garbanzo beans. For that touch of yellow, maybe use a bit of extra virgin olive oil as part of your oil. I use that as my oil and my mayo is always the color of butter. (Which isn't very mayo like either).
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