Mayonnaise

FINALLY. Good lord, this has taken me a million tries over two years and any number of hours reading all the detailed directions online. I may be exaggerating, but I've failed a good handful of times!

All the while my french friends tell me "oh its so easy...!" or "I make it all the time, of course I'll show you." but no one did. Curse the gods of mayonnaise!!

And then, in an extreme anti-climax, Karen showed me sunday. I am now very angry at all those sites that tried to tell me it was difficult, that i should buy special equipement, tricks, tips... I feel so betrayed.

You will need a bowl and a whisk. An egg, a spoonful of dijon and a spoon of red wine vinegar (optional). And about a cup of oil. Vegetable oil, probably.

I. Put one egg yolk in a bowl. Add a generous tablespoon of dijon mustard. Stir.

II. Add a small glug of oil. As in, a tablespoon or two. Choose your oil according to your personal taste because your mayonnaise will taste like the oil you use. Sunflower seed oil worked well. Vegetable oil seems to work well, too. Olive oil, Karen tells me, is a little harder to get to "climb" but it can work. Whisk until it goes from looking like little white bugs in oil to looking like mayonnaise. Its called emulsion, but thats not important.

III. Add another glug of oil. Repeat. A couple times.

IV. Add a tablespoon of vinegar oil for flavor along with your next glug of oil. Continue adding a glug at a time and whisking.

V. When it starts to look more white than yellow, and you have about a cup and a half of mayonnaise, you can call it finished.

I am not going to add all the tips and tricks here, because they only confused me for a long time. I can see why people added them, but good lord! way to throw me off my game, bloggers... But there is one good trick. If all is going well and then suddenly it breaks down into a bowl of oil and you can't get it to "remount," break another yolk into another bowl and start over, adding this "broken" mayonnaise instead of oil.