The Best Mayo- No, Really.

Jun 23

3 min read

I love mayo. All mayo. The smooth, the tart. A few years ago, likely because I went about 7 years of eating eggs probably every day and then some, I developed a sudden onset of egg intolerance. It took too long to make the connection, but once I eliminated eggs from my diet my symptoms disappeared. I missed two things desperately: fried duck eggs in bacon fat on a bagel post a heavy weight lifting workout, and mayo. No substitute for the fried eggs, but Follow Your Heart Vegenaise was a godsend. I will still buy it when it shows up on my Amazon Fresh suggestions, but fortunately in the last year my egg intolerance subsided. I did very gradually reintroduce eggs into my diet after 2 years of strict no eggs. I'm nervous to jump into the fried eggs, but I'm so down for the mayo.

This time of year I have too many duck eggs. I have about a 2:1 ratio of laying duck hens to chicken hens, for two main reasons:

I can keep a drake (male), so I can hatch out my own birds. This is helpful because I can control which bird combo's lineage keeps going. I'll write about this later if anyone is interested.
With good care, ducks live and lay forever. Part of this is I don't have the breeds that have been designed to lay as much as chickens. My ducks have a shorter season- they start in February and stop usually late July when it stays hot for several weeks. They molt, they're done laying, they start quacking. Chickens start just shortly after the ducks, but they continue usually through mid-October. Some of my still laying ducks are 8-10 years old. My chickens are usually DONE with any kind of production by about 6.

This weekend I became nostalgic for my mother's German potato salad, so I went on a quest to reproduce it. I looked at my duck egg surplus and decided it was time to do the mayo.

Here is the recipe:

Heads up, I use a Vitamix, so this recipe is catered to people who are using that, or a type of blender.

1 duck egg, plus 1 duck egg yolk - room temp

1.5 tablespoons of rice vinegar (original recipe called for lemon juice of just white vinegar. I prefer the taste of rice vinegar)

1.5 teaspoon Dijon Mustard. However, I used the Hickory Farms Sweet Hot, because of the nostalgia. The mustard helps with consistency.

1.25 cup neutral oil. I used canola.

Salt to taste- I used probably .25 tsp because I like it on the salty.

A pinch of White Pepper. This is my secret sauce for a lot of my recipes. I make a killer Smoked Mac and Cheese for Thanksgiving and use it liberally there.

Okay, here is where it's important to pay attention to detail.

Everything room temp, which will help with emulsification.

Crack the egg into the Vitamix, add vinegar and mustard. Blend on low-medium low for about 10-15 seconds until combined.

SLOWLY ADD OIL: I messed up a few batches with this. Seriously, DROPS at a time. I used a splatter screen and then poured the drops in through the screen.

10/10 recommend. Run the Vitamix on the lowest setting. When it starts to thicken (you can hear it change texture) you can increase the speed slightly and the stream of the oil, I still keep it super small. Think a very thin, steady stream. Plan on this process taking about 2 minutes, maybe more.

CHECK CONSISTENCY AND FLAVOR: After it is definitely thickening, check the flavor. Add a little more vinegar or lemon or salt or pepper to your liking. Then blend to your desired thickness. For my potato salad it ended up quite fluffy, and the only difference was that I had a little bit of lemon juice to use. Today I only used vinegar and it ended up more creamy, less fluffy. Looks like I'll get to experiment more. Darn. side note: after checking on the mayo about 45 minutes later it thickened up NICELY