When I was growing up, I hated mayonnaise, salad dressing, mustard, pickles, and anything made with these ingredients. As I got older, I learned to like mustard and some pickles. Mayonnaise and salad dressing (and their derivative sauces) are still on my won’t-eat-by-choice list. The problem is I often don’t have a choice.
McDonald’s takes a good bit of the blame for this. Think of the “special sauce” on a Big Mac. Since then, nearly every joint is hell-bent on putting a mayonnaise-based sauce on its burgers. Some restaurants will refer to the sauce as aioli, but it’s just pimped-up mayonnaise with different oil and flavorings.
- The mayonnaise pestilence extends beyond burgers. Three examples:
- We had lunch at a mall bakery. One of the sandwich offerings was hot pastrami, with mayonnaise. This is not kosher, even if the mayonnaise is. Wolfie Cohen, of the dearly-departed Rascal House delicatessen in North Miami Beach, would do cartwheels in his grave at the thought. Mustard is the only correct spread for pastrami sandwiches, specifically Gulden’s spicy brown. Fortunately, I looked the woman taking the order in the eye, said “Hold the mayo”, and the mayo did not appear on the sandwich.
North Carolina-style pulled pork sandwiches are traditionally topped with coleslaw. The Lexington-style slaw is vinegar-based, and works wonders to cut the richness of the pork. The Eastern-style slaw contains mayonnaise. I found this out the hard way when we stopped at Wilber’s Barbecue in Goldsboro many years ago. - “French fries” or pommes frites served with mayonnaise. This is wrong on so many levels. (Sorry, Belgium!)
What’s wrong with a little Hellman’s (or Best on the West Coast or Duke’s in the South), you ask? Plenty.
- Anthony Bourdain refers to mayonnaise as “food glue”, and I agree with his assessment. Mayonnaise keeps canned tuna from falling out of your sandwich and onto your lap–sometimes.
- Over 90% of mayonnaise’s calories come from fat. I have a better use for those calories–chocolate.
- Most supermarket mayonnaise is bland oil (such as soybean or canola) emulsified with egg yolk. Bland oil = bland mayonnaise.
- Life is too short to eat bland food. Why else do you see yuppie burger joints top their cheeseburgers with pesto aioli or chipotle mayonnaise?
- That tablespoon of basil or teaspoon of chipotle per cup of mayo is the difference between a $4 burger and a $12 burger. Do the math, friends.
There is one good use for mayonnaise: as an instructional aid. I was a teaching assistant for a food chemistry laboratory in graduate school. The students made both mayonnaise and hollandaise sauce (butter-based mayonnaise made over heat). This demonstrates the basic principle that oil and water don’t mix unless you have a compound such as the lecithin in egg yolk to coat tiny fat particles so they stay separate and don’t coalesce. This concept, emulsification, can be used to teach about other situations where you don’t want large clumps of oil, such as the use of detergents to clean oil-slicked beaches and animals.
A more important example of emulsification is how your body transports fat through the bloodstream. Fat and cholesterol from your diet are packaged with protein, lecithin and similar compounds in the small intestine into particles called chylomicrons. If you get your blood drawn a few hours after a burger and fries meal, the liquid portion of your blood will look a lot like thin mayonnaise. The chylomicrons stay suspended even after the red and white blood cells settle to the bottom of the test tube. Fat and cholesterol made within the liver are similarly packaged into particles called very-low-density lipoproteins (or VLDL). As cells in the body take fat out of the VLDL, the cholesterol-rich particle becomes low-density lipoprotein (LDL, the “bad cholesterol”). High-density lipoprotein (HDL, the “good cholesterol”) shuttles excess cholesterol from body cells back to the liver for eventual elimination in the bile, which contains other emulsifiers to disperse fat into tiny droplets in your next meal.
Mayonnaise is a great teaching tool, provided that I don’t have to eat it once class is over.
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