I have to admit it. I adore Michael Ruhlman. His book The Making of a Chef is wonderful, as are his blog and, the book I’m reading now, The Soul of a Chef. A couple of months ago he posted some photos and a recipe for mayonnaise on his blog. I filed it in the back of my head and promised myself to try it some time. Today was that day. It was more whisking than I’m used to but the work and sweat (it was hot today!) were worth it. I’m going to try the “food blogger” approach to things here so I took pictures as I went.
Here’s the mis en place:
Eggs, water, lemon juice and salt, along with about five backs-of-the-spoon worth of drizzled oil:
Here it is with about 1/2 cup of the oil integrated:
A close up of the finished mayo:
And in a container ready for storage:
Of course even I can’t just eat mayo (as good as it is) from a spoon, so I made some egg salad. This is simple stuff:
- Four hard boiled eggs, chopped into roughly 1/4 inch cubes. I cooked these using the Alton Brown method: put the eggs and plenty of water in a covered saucepan. Bring the water to a rolling boil and then remove from the heat. Wait ten minutes and then stop the cooking by immersing the eggs in cold/ice water. You now have perfectly cooked hard boiled eggs.
- 1/3 cup of mayonnaise.
- Plenty of pepper.
I grilled some Iggy’s francese in butter in my cast iron pan, sliced a tomato and put it all together to make this:
