The Meaning of Life and Other Vegetables

Hello everyone!

I have a pretty bad addiction – to mayonnaise. I know, I know – it’s not healthy, it’s not purely plant-based etc. etc… Everyone has their vices.

Well, at least my mayo has no preservatives in it. Not intended ones – maybe it has some by a happy coincidence. I make my own mayo, and today I’ll teach you a neat trick to make some yourselves, if you’re interested. When I first learned how to make mayo from scratch, almost 40 years ago, it involved some work and some patience. That’s a life lesson too, but not what I intend to talk about today. Most people who ever made mayo from scratch know that method – it involves stirring, and a lot of it. But that’s no longer necessary!

The life lesson, you ask?… Here: “Don’t get bogged down. Shit happens.” It’s a great lesson for recovering perfectionists (like me).

But first, I need to tell you the secret.

It involves a stick blender, and a technique that you can master with a tiny bit of practice (or none at all, if you’re a tiny bit lucky).

Other than a stick blender (I dare say even the cheapest / simplest would do – nothing fancy required), you’d need a tall-ish, cylindrical container, not much bigger in diameter than the blending head of your stick blender. I use a clear plastic, graduated measuring container, which goes up to 600ml and has a fairly straight wall. The top opening is about 9cm in diameter. I guess you could pull it off with a non-transparent container, but it’s much more convenient if you can see what’s going on inside.

You start making the mayo by cracking a single raw egg into the container (and leaving it alone). Then you top it up to the 300ml mark with “plain” vegetable oil. I use sunflower oil, but you can pick other types. Then you immerse the stick blender all the way to the bottom. Now it’s magic time. A few pulses spaced apart, to get it going, then you let it run continuously for a few seconds, without moving it. Very quickly you’ll see some mayo forming at the bottom – don’t get too excited! It might still break. Now it’s the moment of truth. You start to raise the stick blender, ever so slightly (2-3 mm, not more), while it’s running continuously, then you hold it there until you feel “it’s done” (you don’t see anything changing anymore), and then again, a little upwards. It’s essential not to rush it, and keep going in tiny moves upwards, with appropriate intervals between them (it’s not one continuous move upwards) – this is when the mayo is made! All of this happens while you keep the blender running continuously.

Eventually, you will reach the top of the substance in the container – you can hold the blender there for a bit longer, while it’s still running, and enjoy seeing your lovely, pasty mayo flowing from within the blender head, a little like toothpaste. Now you can let go of the trigger. Most of the oil & egg has already turned into mayo, but there is still some residual oil on top, and maybe the mayo is not as firm as you’d like it to be. Push the blender down through the mayo, all the way to the floor, start the blender, and pull it up again, slowly, this time in one continuous move. When it comes out the top, stop it, shake off the mayo, then repeat that move again – as many times as required (for me it’s usually 4-5 times).

Once the base mayo is made, I add lemon juice from half a lemon, and half a teaspoon salt. It might sound like a lot of salt. I know. You can add less; I like my mayo salty – maybe that’s part of the addiction – I sometimes have salt cravings… Then I mix well, and I keep it in a glass utensil with a sealed lid, in the fridge.

I have used that exact home-made mayo for up to 2 weeks (stored as above, in the fridge). I know, it has raw egg. But it also has lemon juice and salt – both are preservatives if the concentration is high enough. Anyway, I’ve been doing that for years, and I’m still here… Coincidence? Maybe. But maybe it’s just safe. There is a way to find out: Try it and see if you die.

How much lemon juice to add is a matter of compromise. I also crave the lemoniness of mayo, but if you add too much it becomes too runny. The above quantities are a happy medium for me; you can find yours through experimentation. One thing to note is that when you first make it, it’s a bit runnier, and after a night in the fridge it “gels” a little.

So, what was that talk about “shit happens”?

Well, seldom it fails. When you start inching up the first time (after the initial pulses), too much oil might get sucked in too quickly (or whatever – I’m not 100% sure about the science here), and within seconds the whole contents of the container become a swirling, milky, frothy, horrible mix. This is irreversible! At least as far as I know. You stand there, horrified, and you watch your precious life’s work go to waste. It’s a terrible moment, and it doesn’t get easier with time. All that’s left to do at that stage is just pour the horror down the drain, clean everything up and dry it, and start over. The good news are that it happens maybe once in every 10-15 tries.

Science moment:
(Don’t quote me on any of this, it’s possible I just made it all up):

Mayo (a little like cow milk) is an emulsion. That means it consists of a water-based “matrix” (or a skeleton) – in this case the egg – that holds a much larger quantity of oil/fat-based substance, in isolated compartments. Think of it as many oil “bubbles”, separated from one another by very thin walls of egg substance. maybe a little like a sponge structure. The beauty of it is that the walls can be extremely thin and can stretch to hold a lot of oil in the “bubbles”. What’s even prettier is that once it takes this structure, it’s relatively stable. It starts with forming the structure around relatively small oil droplets, then they can each take up more oil, and “grow”. Indefinitely? Well, I don’t know, but in theory you could add more and more oil to your mayo after it’s formed. That’s how it works in the old, manual, method of mixing forever, that I mentioned earlier.

This is illuminating for the “shit happens” occasions. In that case, the delicate matrix doesn’t form, everything just mixes “normally”, and I guess if you examined that filth microscopically, you’d see 2 distinct phases – egg and oil (but I don’t really know; all I know is that it’s NOT mayo). Why does it happen? I’m not sure about that – a food technologist might know. Maybe it’s about the natural variation among eggs…? Maybe it’s got to do with the rate of taking the oil in…? When you slowly raise the blender, that’s what you do – you effectively add oil very gradually (as you’d do manually in the old method). Maybe it has to do with shearing and forces and the likes… I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter too much.

Finally, the life lesson… I used to get devastated when something like that happened to me in life. Not just mayo. We’ve all been there: You plan and get ready, you follow best practices, you pay attention and give it your all. And you succeed! Many times. But then… sometimes you don’t, and it looks so random. Why??? What did I do wrong? Did I lose my focus for a split second? Was something off from the outset? Was it “bad luck” (but what if you don’t believe in luck, only in science and technology)? Did the gods punish me for <whatever>? Haha. What’s worse – many times you don’t know, and can never find out.

That used to really bring me down. And that sour feeling sure did come up the first few times my mayo “broke” (after an initial number of times it succeeded spectacularly). I literally got scared to try again right away, because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to handle another failure straight up.

But… time and experience cured it. The mayo broke? Okay. Flush it, wash it, dry it, start over. Voila. Beautiful mayo, on take 2. You know what? In many years of doing that, including a dozen or more broken mayos, never have I ever had my mayo break 2 times in a row, in the same session. After a while, I reflected on the whole affair, and took it in, and then I realized I can apply it in many other failure contexts. It’s a really handy life lesson.

Don’t get bogged down. Shit happens. Get up, dust yourself, and maybe try again if you’re up for it. Maybe not always straight away. Maybe not always, full stop. But the fact that something didn’t work out, and you don’t understand why, and maybe you never will (because maybe you can’t), should not stop you. Sure, it’s not fun to fail. But maybe next time it will work. It’s a good practice to try to understand what happened, to maybe avoid it happening again; but watch for analysis-paralysis. Sometimes it’s just shit, which happened.

Bonus material: My Lifelong Love Affair with Mayo

(No, Mayo is not a girl)

When I was growing up in the 1970s all we had for mayo was some industrial, runny, heavy with vinegar, substitute. It was called mayo, but that’s where it ended. And yet, I liked it in my sandwiches. I didn’t know any better.

When I was 17 or 18, I visited my older brother and his girlfriend (later wife), and they served home made mayo, which they made the manual way. Very lemony. My mind was blown away; I was hooked. I asked, and they taught me how to make it.

A couple of years later I visited my navy buddy. His parents just returned from several years of living in The Netherlands, and we were having a meal at their place. They had some Dutch mayo – apparently they brough some stock with them when they returned. Bahm! My brain exploded, and my addiction went up a few notches. That was the 1980s, and international commerce wasn’t as commonplace, and really good commercial mayo was not available on our supermarket shelves yet.

After my navy time ended and I went back to my home community, we had a nightguard duty roster, a week at a time. The nights at the gate and patrolling the fields were long and boring, but there is one good memory I keep. Every morning at around 3 or 4 am the bakery truck would roll in with the day’s fresh bread for several hundred people. After letting it in through the gate, my role was to drive the patrol car behind the truck, to the communal kitchen, and once the delivery person offloaded the big boxes of fresh, warm bread, to put them in and lock up, then escort the bakery truck back out. As the night guard, I was allowed to take some bread with me back to the gate booth, for an early breakfast… the texture, smell and taste of that fresh bread was amazing, maybe a little because it was at the end of a long, dark, lonely and boring night… What has all that got to do with mayo, you might ask?… I used to have some simple sandwiches of that heavenly bread, a good layer of mayo, some cheddar cheese and some tomato slices, and somehow that made for the tastiest food on Earth. Maybe that phase sealed-in my mayo addiction, for good.

Or maybe that actually took place a year or two later…? I went to Amsterdam, and for the first time in my life had the famous Dutch chips with mayo. Heaven! Freshly made, crispy, hot, salty chips (for some of you: read “French fries”), in a cone of rolled newspaper, with a massive squirt of that godly Dutch mayo – this time, right at the source!… Before that experience, the only condiment I knew for hot chips was ketchup (for some of you: read “tomato sauce”, haha). Imagine that!

Fast forward about 30 years… In the meantime, “good” commercial mayo became easily accessible, and I became a steady consumer, gradually making my way “up”, to more and more “wholesome” (and tastier) brands, and paying nicely for the addiction. Then I met my older brother’s wife one day, and somehow we got to talk about mayo… She said, why spend much?… you can make your own – healthier and tastier. I said “Yes, but who has the patience for endless stirring?…” Then she taught me the stick blender trick. Now you know it too.

Peace to all.

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Did you know…? There are more posts in this blog than are presented to you right now. It’s an attribute of the template which I can’t change.
How to see all of them?
Click on the header – the bold “The Meaning of Life and Other Vegetables” at the top. You’ll get a list (which is not complete either), with a button at the bottom to access the next list, and so on. Those go all the way back to my first post in this blog.
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