Homemade Mayonnaise Recipe

I have found that making mayonnaise from scratch is very easy! It may seem counter intuitive, but doing it by hand is actually easier than trying to get an emulsion in a mixer or blender.

There are a few things that I have learned that will be helpful to you if you decide to try to make your own. The first is, use fresh farm/yard eggs. I don't know what they've done to our commercial egg supply, but the yolks are not the same. I know, you find that incredibly hard to believe. {/snark} Fresh yard eggs will make an emulsion and keep it without you even having to do anything, I mean unless you just dump all the oil in. If you pour the oil slowly and stir fast, the emulsion makes itself (or in Soviet Russia emulsion makes you!)

Secondly, you will want to use "light tasting olive oil" like this here (or whatever brand you'd rather have). Other types of olive oil can have a very strong flavor, which might be okay in some instances, like if you're making dressing out of it. Don't use lard. Trust me on this.

Finally, I've found that a mixture of sherry wine vinegar and lemon juice really makes the best mayonnaise.

So the recipe? There are literally dozens of them, maybe hundreds, but I've found the best one to make by hand is based on the one from Mastering the Art of French Cooking* by Julia Child, et al.

I've altered it though, because it says either sherry wine vinegar or lemon juice, but I insist that using both is better. I also reduce the amount of boiling water needed, maybe because I add more vinegar/lemon juice than she says to. I also suggest you buy the book, because it is one of the best cookbooks ever :)

Homemade Mayonnaise by hand

• 4 egg yolks

• 1 T. sherry wine vinegar
• 1 T. lemon juice
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp prepared or unprepared mustard

• ~17 oz bottle of light tasting olive oil
• Sherry wine vinegar and lemon juice as needed (about 3T. of each)
  

• 3 T. boiling water

All you need is a bowl and a whisk to make this. Make sure your bowl is warm (but dry!) so to take the chill off your eggs. Beat the egg yolks until they are thick and sticky, about two minutes.

Add the vinegar, lemon juice, salt and mustard. Beat for 30 seconds.

Then add the oil, a teaspoon at a time at first (don't stop stirring until you have an emulsion!), then once you have an emulsion (after about a quarter of the bottle) you can add a Tablespoon at a time. Once you do have an emulsion, make sure you whip it good after adding oil, before adding any more. When the mixture gets thick, add more sherry wine vinegar or lemon juice to thin it out, alternating between the two. I generally add about 3 T. of each during the course of adding the oil, a Tablespoon here and there. Once you have added all the oil, you'll want to add the boiling water to keep the mayonnaise from turning.

And buy the book! There are a lot more details about making mayonnaise in it, and all about how to fix turned mayonnaise and how to save a mixture that has lost the emulsion. I can't recommend it enough, it's really one of my favorite cook books of all time.

*The edition we have is an old one, so I don't know if they've changed anything in the newer versions

What have they done? Genetically modifying food, low-fat, and declining mental health

I made some homemade mayonnaise today. This is the first time that I used yard eggs in it. The last few times I made it, I used store bought eggs. The yard eggs are expensive, what can I say? I have always noticed that the store bought eggs' shells seem to be very brittle and easily broken. The yard eggs have shells that you have to actually tap hard to break. If I get used to cooking with yard eggs and then go back to the store bought ones, I will make a mess hitting that first egg on the edge of the bowl, because the store bought eggs' shells shatter. What have they done to our food supply?

What prompted this post was, while I was making the mayonnaise, I noticed that it emulsified easily. The store bought eggs don't do that. It's actually kinda crazy. I remember reading that they had been breeding and feeding chickens (or more than likely genetically altering the chickens) to produce lower cholesterol eggs.

"Why the shift [in cholesterol]? The decrease in cholesterol might reflect an improvement in hens' diet, the agency says in a statement. Here's the full USDA Statement."

Because I'll turn into a pumpkin at midnight if mother nature would know what to feed a chicken!

Cholesterol is vital for cell membrane stability. If you don't understand the importance of that statement there, I suggest you pick up a basic biology text book. To top it all off, if you don't eat enough cholesterol, your body will make it for you, because you NEED it.

Add into the mix the fact that Monsanto has a gigantic monopoly on what is grown in this country, to the point that they can sue farmers because their genetically modified seeds are spread by the wind or birds, and they win(!?!?!WTF?!??!?!), one has to ask themselves, where are we going here? There will come a point (if we are not already beyond it) where there will be no turning back, and we will have permanently screwed up our food supply.

Beyond that, we come to an even more important thing. The astonishing rise of mental illness in this country. Saturated fat is important. I think that's an understatement of immense proportions. And what have they done? Told people to avoid eating fat, but especially saturated fat. Saturated fat is important for brain health. It's why we are intelligent. Our ancestors eating more saturated fat is probably what set us on the evolutionary path that we are on, and is what allowed our brains to grow bigger and more powerful. The drugs they prescribe people for ADHD, bipolar, depression and other mental illnesses like schizophrenia, do not work in the long term. The long term outcomes are actually worse for people who stay on their medication.

After one starts reading all this, they can't help but wonder if this low-fat crap is perpetuated by greed in what would rival even the most outrageous of conspiracies. By eating low-fat and high carb crap, people wreck their physical and mental health, needing drugs for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, depression (which many of the anti-depressants trigger bipolar), ADHD (which ritalin leads to violent and aggressive behavior and wrecks the development of the brain).

What have they done? The powers-that-be are profiting off of this, they have destroyed countless lives by doing so, and worse, I think they KNOW what they're doing.