How to Make Homemade Mayonnaise 3 Ways (One With No Machine)

Last week, I used mayonnaise to make the moistest chocolate cake you've ever seen. Today, I'm going to show you how to make your own homemade mayonnaise. Hi, I'm Gemma Stafford, a professional chef, and for over a decade I've been showing you how everyday basic baking ingredients are better homemade. I'll show you how to make mayonnaise three different ways, including one that you can do simply with nothing but a bowl and a hand whisk. So I'm going to show you three very different methods to make homemade mayonnaise. We're going to start out with a blender and immersion blender because that's the most popular, it's fastest, and it's almost foolproof. So it's really easy to do as long as you have an immersion blender. I use this for sweet and savory. So if you're looking for a piece of kitchen equipment to buy yourself, you can get them for as cheap as $20 euros, whatever. And they're really, really handy. So first thing when you're making an immersion blender mayonnaise, you have to make sure that you have a tall jar that fits your immersion blender all the way to the bottom like so, but it's narrow. So when you are blending up your mayo, you're able to combine all of the ingredients without having to go searching for them. If you do a bowl that's too big, a jug that's too big, it won't blend and it will crack. To make homemade mayonnaise, you only need a few ingredients. We're going to start out with a whole egg. So here's the thing about a whole egg. For immersion blender mayonnaise, often people, the kind of trend nowadays is to use the whole egg and not just the yolk. Traditional mayonnaise was always made just using the yolk. It's richer, it gets creamier and you get a thicker emulsion. Using the whole egg is not wrong. It's not a bad thing. Number one, you don't waste the egg white. It'll be a little bit lighter, but it also will work really, really well. And it's just a way that people are making mayonnaise nowadays, which makes it just easier and more cost effective. Let me just clarify, you can make homemade mayo without the egg white. You can't make it without an egg yolk. The egg yolk is the key to mayonnaise. It has lectin in it, which is what makes the emulsion and helps it bind together with the water. So you have to have the yolk. Key note about the egg, room temperature to blend up so much easier, just like we do in all my baking recipes. Also, if you're concerned about raw eggs, buy pasteurized eggs. Next up, Dijon mustard. Now this is not just for flavor, even though it gives us great flavor. It also is an emulsifier. But get this, mustard actually contains a natural emulsifier. So putting this in the recipe is what's going to help to bind the oil and the water together. So it's really important. I do recommend Dijon mustard, not yellow mustard. That can work in a pinch. But for flavor and quality, Dijon is the way you want to go. Next, we're going to put in a little bit of lemon juice. This is a little bit of the acidity in our mayonnaise. It's not required for emulsion, but it gives it a kind of a bright flavor. And then we're going to add in some vinegar. You can use white wine vinegar. You can use red wine vinegar. You can also use apple cider vinegar. So the reason that we have acid in here, one important thing is it won't kill any bacteria that's in there, but it will stop it from growing. So it does serve a good purpose, not just with flavor and brightness and all those things. Lastly, salt. Salt is really important because you have to bump up the flavor of this because the flavor can be quite plain and it really develops from the other things you add into it. Okay, we're almost there. So that's our base. And let's talk about our oil. I'm using vegetable oil here. You can use canola, grapeseed, avocado oil works really well. Olive oil is not recommended. A mild olive oil is totally fine. Or if you want to do half olive oil and another oil, just don't do 100% all olive oil. It'll be very strong tasting and almost kind of bitter. And that won't be fun to eat. So I'm just using regular vegetable oil. All these notes are going to be on BiggerBolderBaking.com along with the recipe. Okay, here's the method for immersion blender mayo. Into our jar. Start your blender on high and drizzle in your oil. The best method I've found is to avoid any spillage and to drizzle it in slowly. Raise your jug of oil. So it just flows in there. The other day I made it and the oil was in too small of a jug and it went all over the counter. So make sure your amount of oil is in a nice big jug so you can pour it in. One very important thing about immersion blender mayo is keep the immersion blender in the one place for the first minute or so before moving it around. That makes sure that you have a good immersion from the start and your mayo stays together. Once it comes together at the beginning, you can move it. Towards the end, you can pour in the oil a little bit swiftly. It doesn't have to be as slow and then just go up and down with the blender to make sure it comes together and all the oil is incorporated before you stop blending. If you feel like it's too thin, add a little bit more oil maybe or mustard. If it's too thick, feel free to add in a few splashes of water. It really takes two minutes. And look at that lovely thick mayo. Okey dokey. Look at that. I'm just going to show you what lovely mayo we made. Look at that beautiful thick. Oh, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. Okay, that's one easy method done. Let's move on to the next one. Next method I'm going to show you is food processor method. The thing about this is that my food processor is kind of big. If you have one of these inlays like this, that helps because you can't with just one egg do it in this big drum. It just won't work and it will split. So you can use one of those little mini food processors or you can do an inlay. If you're looking to buy one of those little mini food processors, I see them all the time in thrift stores and Goodwill just an FYI. Now let's put in our things. Here with our egg again, room temperature. We have our vinegar, lemon juice. Experiment with your vinegars. Do whatever vinegar you like. Don't do balsamic. Actually, don't do whatever vinegar you like, but salt, red wine, white wine, apple cider. Okay, here goes your mustard again. Mustard is a condiment that I always have to have in the house because I make a lot of salad dressings and I use it in my salad dressings. So it's always handy to just have it in your cupboard. It never goes bad. And just an FYI, we're going to make it with just a regular blade. Okay, what you're going to want to do is let this zoom, zoom, zoom for around 10 seconds or so just by itself. So that 10 seconds or so just starts the emulsion. And you're going to want to do that before we start to add in the oil. Take this out. So now our oil again, I'm using vegetable oil. When doing this method, what you want to do is slowly add in a quarter of your oil during this process for the first bit. This is where the emulsion, it makes or breaks literally the emulsion. So drizzle just like we did there a few seconds ago. Slowly be patient. You try and rush this. It will not work. Slowly go in with a quarter. I see our emulsion is coming together. It's looking good. Once you have established a good base of emulsion, once a quarter of it's in there, it starts to thicken. You can pour in more liberally. And you don't have to be as careful. Once all your oil is in, I can see it's nice and thick. And there we stop. Look at that. You never really know until you take off the lid, look under the hood to see if it turned out well. Oh, do you know what? I like this version because you can actually see it. There's more air bubbles in it. So it's kind of light and airy and like soft. So if you're doing it for like a dip or something. Oh yeah, baby. Yummy. If you open it up, there's still oil that is not completely combined. Give it a shush down with a spatula back on the lid. Zoom it back up because you're going to want to do that with a high powered blender. You could also do this method in a Vitamix or in a Ninja as long as you can drizzle in oil in the top and that will work really well. Okay, two methods down. Successfully done. Great. Let's move on to the last one. So I'm going from easiest method to hardest. The third one is by hand, completely by hand. Old school with a whisk and a bowl. Now, if this does not work out, you'll forget that you saw it and I'll come back and I'll use an electric hand mixer and we'll say nothing about it. But let's just try it out because we can always just edit. So into a large bowl, make sure that bowl is large. Let me tell you why you need room to whisk. You need room to get air in. That's really important. So in goes our room temperature egg, our Dijon mustard, lemon juice, vinegar and salt. We are going to do exactly what we did with the others. Start out by mixing the base ingredients together to get the emulsion started. Now working in kitchens for over the years, I did a lot of hollandaise sauces, mayonnaises, things like that. The one thing that's really handy is put your bowl on a tea towel. Actually, even if it's a little bit wet, that helps. But it helps to hold your bowl in place and stop it from moving around so much. It makes life a lot easier. So start the emulsion. A few seconds. This looks good to me. Everybody cross your fingers. Now, here we go slowly with the oil. Same exact methods as before, adding in very slowly, drip by drip. So we slowly emulsify. If you dump it all in there at once, it'll split. We're going to do a bowl baking hotline while I'm doing this, because why not? And one of the questions was what happens if your mayonnaise splits? Very simple. Don't throw it out. Don't freak out. What you can do if you do have an immersion blender is pop it into a blender and try to bring it back together. Or if you're doing it by hand, get a new bowl, one egg yolk, slowly stream in and whisk at the same time the cracked mayonnaise and it should come together pretty easily. OK, this is looking good. I'm optimistic. I'm going to keep going. Another question is why did my mayonnaise come up thick? And the answer is keep on blending it. If it really doesn't come up thick, maybe add in another egg yolk. Blending it with an immersion blender or a food processor with the ingredients that I gave you should end up with a thick mayonnaise. If you want to be a little bit thicker, don't do egg white. There you go. Actually, I said that earlier on. Don't do egg white. Oh, this is working. Do you see this? OK, how long does homemade mayonnaise last? Good question, because it's not as long as the mayonnaise I have in my fridge right now, which lasts forever. It lasts around two weeks. Don't leave it longer than two weeks. And also feel free now to flavor it. You have your own homemade mayonnaise. You can make homemade ranch dressing, which I love. You can make tartar sauce. Love even more. And spicy mayonnaise, garlic mayonnaise, which is called aioli. I'm going to put different varieties on the website post so you can see other ones that you can make. But it's a base recipe. And the reason I'm showing you how to make mayonnaise is because I mentioned that last week we made the mayonnaise cake, which was a chocolate cake that base ingredients. The main ingredient was mayo. It was absolutely delicious. If you didn't see it, check it out. But mayonnaise is like the sleeping tiger. Is that a thing? Sleeping tiger? Sleeping tiger of baking ingredients. If that's not right, they're going to come after me now. So I'm going to blame you. Oh, look, it's thickening. So this recipe makes around a big, generous cup of mayonnaise. Feel free to double it if you want to, if you're doing a food processor. But one thing you don't want to do if you end up with too much is freezing it. It just won't last. It'll break down in the freezer. So if you've been following Bigger Bolder Baking for a long time, you know that I have a lot of what we call Bold Baking Basics, which is homemade versions of ingredients that can sometimes be hard to find in the store. Or, you know, you don't have to hand like buttermilk, vanilla extracts, food dyes, condensed milk, evaporated milk. I mean, I've made it all, even homemade sprinkles. And the reason I'm making this mayo is because now I'm baking with mayonnaise. And I wanted to show you how easy it is to make it at home. So I'm adding this recipe to my Bold Baking Basics, because I also have a recipe for how to make your own butter and then flavor the butter. We're just going old school right now. OK, look at that. I did it. OK, Sophia, you can keep this footage. I think we did it. Lovely. Not as thick as the other because I was doing it by hand. But keep on beating it. Feel free to get it a little bit thicker. But I am pretty happy with this. Lovely, jubbly. Delicious. Perfect. And there you have it. Three successful methods to make homemade mayonnaise. Now all that's left to do is try it. I'll be honest, there's nothing I won't put mayonnaise on. But one of my favorite ways to have it is with a classic BLT. Mayo, bacon, tomato, some lettuce, more mayo, sandwich together. Breakfast of champions. Another great use and very popular amongst Europeans is chips and mayo. We love our French fries in Europe. And what better way to serve them with some homemade mayonnaise on top. But remember, this recipe is a base recipe. From here you can make aioli, spicy mayo, chipotle mayo, Caesar dressing, tartar sauce and ranch dressing. All from scratch. I hope you learned from this video that homemade mayonnaise is so easy to make and so delicious. If you'd like more basic recipes like this, get comfy. I have tons for you to check out. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you back here again really soon.