Homemade -v- shop mayonnaise

Now I might be a little biased here as I compare our own homemade mayonnaise with shop bought mayonnaise but please read on.  Through this I am shocked at how crappy the shop bought mayonnaise really is.

I don’t quite know why Rachel decided to suddenly make some homemade may0; it’s just the kind of thing she’ll suddenly do.  It is one of the reasons why I love her!  I was stunned at how rich and ‘natural’ tasting her mayonnaise was – I don’t think I’ve ever had homemade mayonnaise before.

It took her no time at all.  Just an egg, a good slug of oil, a pinch of salt and a tiny amount of mustard powder.  A quick blast with the Bamix (and I mean quick) and it was done, in a couple of seconds.  The secret to success is apparently the Bamix with its flat-but-wonky disc which whizzes around at a very high speed to make a kind of emulsion through thrashing the ingredients together.

The taste?  Rich and creamy, quite filling so you don’t need much.  Great on salads etc.

And then comparing to the shop-bought mayonnaise 

Interesting, very interesting.

You see I have been programmed over the years to expect mayonnaise to taste a particular way and anything different would then seem odd.  This illustrates itself beautifully with mayo.  We normally have Hellmans, or sometimes we have the Aldi version and this is what is in the fridge right now.  We therefore expect mayonnaise to taste a particular way.

I was shocked at the Aldi mayonnaise ingredients – water, rapeseed oil, modified starch, maize starch, salt, reconstituted pasteurised free range egg yolk (1.5%), stabilisers: guar gum, xanthin gum, concentrated lime juice, preservative: potassium sorbate, natural mustard flavouring and the list of nasty things goes on…..

Now it’s true our homemade version doesn’t have much in the way of preservatives in it, so it cannot hang around the fridge for very long.  Interestingly commercial mayo has 1-5% egg and yet ours has 50%, give or take a bit.  So now I can’t see any reason why we wouldn’t want to have the real stuff instead of the shop-bought stuff.  While I might be laying in to the Aldi product (branded as ‘Bramwells’) but I am sure similar recipes would be used by their competitors.

I am wondering if it’s like coffee.  Think of how the taste of instant coffee is so different to real, freshly ground coffee.  There’s such a vast difference.  I have refused to have instant coffee for over 10 years.  I wonder if mayonnaise will be the same and whether we will be making our home made mayonnaise for years to come?

Maybe, just maybe we will….!