Hacker News Reader

Comment by seszett | Hacker News Reader

The article specifically talks about white mayonnaise.

I have noticed that myself, why is mayonnaise white in the US? As far as I can tell, both home-made and store-bought mayonnaise is yellow in France.

View on HN

Have you seen the ingredients list? Hellman's doesn't resemble the real stuff (they even have the gall to call it 'REAL'):

"Soybean oil, water, whole eggs and egg yolks, vinegar, salt, sugar, lemon juice, natural flavors"

Compare to a recipe (http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/jul...)

  2 egg yolks
  Generous pinch of salt
  250ml groundnut or sunflower oil
  25ml extra virgin olive, walnut or rapeseed oil
  1 tbsp mustard of your choice (or 1tsp mustard powder)
  1 clove garlic, crushed (optional)
  1 tbsp white wine vinegar or lemon juice

The mustard, olive oil, presumably more egg yolk and mustard must contribute to the colour.

According to wikipedia, adding mustard is a French culture thing, and not in the original. I'd say the Hellman's recipe isn't that horrible, compared to standard simple recipes.

Really mayonnaise is just a stable emulsification of oil and egg. That's all that makes it mayo.

To provide another data point, I don't use mustard in my homemade mayonnaise — just oil, egg yolk, salt, garlic, and lemon juice — and when I use olive oil, the mayonnaise comes out slightly green.

"Hellman's doesn't resemble the real stuff"

That's a little exaggerated, don't you think? I'm no mayonnaise expert, but those lists of ingredients look pretty similar to me.

Let's compare the ingredients:

Guardian Recipe vs Hellman's

  2 egg yolks vs Whole eggs and egg yolks

  pinch of salt vs salt
 
  olive/walnut/rapeseed oil vs soybean oil
 
  white wine vinegar or lemon juice vs vinegar & lemon juice

  garlic vs natural flavors

  mustard vs sugar

So really not that different. Hellman's adds sugar instead of mustard and uses soybean oil vs the other three options. This isn't to promote Hellman's, but your argument that it doesn't resemble the real stuff doesn't make sense when the ingredient list is about 90% the same.

You're quibbling over details.

* They're using a different type of oil, no big deal.

* They list water, well, how strong is the vinegar? They could likely take the "water" off the list by simply using a weaker vinegar, but they probably add it at a different stage of processing to simplify flow, so, no big deal.

* I suspect there are a lot of people who feel that if they want mustard they will by god add their own mustard, keep it out of their mayo what are you some kind of food pervert?

* Garlic? Why are you adulterating my emulsion with your bits of smelly crushed plant material? Feh, I say, Feh!

* And finally, I challenge you to put egg yolks in your mayonnaise without getting any egg white / albumen in there. I suspect you're going to have to extract it with a syringe, because no egg separator is going to get rid of all of it.

You can safely ignore any recipes that suggest the use of Olive Oil. The taste overpowers everything else.

One theory is that the US is big on white, mild tasting food because people had to purchase a lot of food from strangers. There were frequently no deep family roots in most cities.

White mild foods (mayo, white bread) can't hide spoiling or contamination as well, so they were safer to buy.

Another theory (at least on this side of the pond) goes something along the lines of: After people got access to refrigerators and freezers and such it was no longer necessary to hide the taste of spoilt foodstuffs, and thus it became high fashion to make your food as mild as possible to show off your fancy new fridge.

Maybe it's using only the egg white and not the yolk?

The yolk (and its lecithin) is supposed to be a key component though. And I don't think the white has any.

isnt the yolk the emulsifier?

Egg yolk is only yellow when whole. Whipped yolk is whitish.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com