Mayonnaise

Mayonnaise is certainly the forgotten one of the five (six?) mother sauces of classic French cooking—all of which are sauces that every cook should know how to prepare well. It’s almost certainly the most common mother sauce. How many times have you seen mayonnaise at the grocery store or at a restaurant? Not even béchamel, the second most common sauce, is seen, bought, or consumed on the scale of mayonnaise.

Mayonnaise in a sense defies the laws of physics that govern the universe. Better stated, it finds a loophole in those laws and then exploits it. Oil and water are not supposed to come together, and yet, in mayo, they do. This happens by way of an emulsion, held together by two things: physical force and an emulsifying chemical agent, which in this case is some kind of mustard. Water and oil are polar molecules, meaning they have positively-charged ends and negatively-charged ends. Left alone, because of their polarities and their different densities (oil floats on water), oil and water will naturally separate, no matter how much whisking or another action that uses physical force to combine the substances is applied to them. Mustard and egg yolks contain molecules that are oleophilic and others that are hydrophilic. Because of this, they can turn the oil into a bunch of microdroplets that cannot coalesce into bigger droplets, holding the oil and water together. Successfully creating this emulsion creates high-quality mayo; failure results in an oil slick on top of all the other ingredients mixed together.

Every part of the procedure for making mayonnaise is designed to make this emulsion as likely as possible to succeed. To this end, I recommend mixing all the other ingredients (vinegar, mustard, egg yolk, and any flavorings, like minced garlic) together, and, only once they’re combined, very slowly incorporating the oil. In his video, it seems like Alex put a whisk attachment on a drill to combine the other ingredients, and then to keep the mixture moving while streaming in the oil. Unorthodox as that approach might be, it certainly works. The average home-cook might not have access to a drill, so three more common tools are just as effective as alternatives: a whisk, a hand-mixer, and a stand-mixer.

Using the hand whisk is certainly the most traditional method, but it’s the most error-prone. Be very careful using a whisk, taking care to always be whisking quickly, vigorously, and continuously. Add il literally a drop at a time in the beginning. As the mixture takes on more oil, you can increase the rate at which you add oil. This is one of the great paradoxes of mayonnaise, and emulsions in general. Vinegar, eggs, mustard, etc., are clearly liquid. Oil is clearly liquid as well. And yet, adding liquid oil into the first liquid mixture turns the resulting emulsion ever more solid as more oil is added.

The hand-mixer is better than the human-powered-whisk method since the whisk attachments are powered by an electrical current and rotate faster than a human could ever rotate a whisk. This creates much smaller oil bubbles in the mixture. The mixture grabs onto smaller oil bubbles more easily than bigger bubbles, and smaller bubbles are easier to trap in a matrix. The easier it is to trap oil bubbles in this matrix, the higher the success rate of the emulsion of the ingredients into mayonnaise.

The stand-mixer approach is in principle the same as the hand-mixer approach, only bigger and better. Stand mixers are generally bigger machines with more powerful motors and bigger whisk attachments. The bigger a whisk attachment, the more air it incorporates into whatever is being whisked. In this particular case, this means the stand-mixer creates even smaller droplets of oil in the vinegar-egg mixture.
But the two electric-powered mixer methods have one potential downfall. An inexperienced chef will assume, just because the electric mixing approach is so much faster and better than any human could be, that the oil can be added all at once and that the delay in adding the oil in the beginning in the first method is only because humans can’t whip as quickly as machines. This is false. Even with the most powerful machine, you still need to add the oil slowly in the beginning.

Whatever method you use to prepare this iconic cold sauce, never lose sight of its foundational importance in French cuisine or of the techniques of building emulsions central to this sauce’s execution. If you do these things, every mayonnaise you prepare from now on will be worthy of the dignity of a mother sauce.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!