When Opposites Attract

It's a lazy, rainy, Sunday morning and you want a no fuss lunch for the family. You've got cold cuts on hand so sandwiches become the obvious answer. As you peruse the fridge you realize you're out of mayonnaise.

Darn! It's pouring outside and you don't want to schlep to the store in the rain for a stupid bottle of mayo. Then you remember the cooking show where the chef made homemade mayonnaise.

You copied down the ingredients during one of those "I'll have to try that sometime" moments. You know. You get the recipe, stick it somewhere and then never make it. Now here's your chance.

One egg yolk, a squirt of white vinegar and lemon juice, half a teaspoon of dry mustard, a cup of vegetable oil and salt and pepper to taste. You toss all the ingredients in the food processor except the oil and whiz them till they're mixed.

Then you slowly drizzle in the oil with the machine on. You remember that the oil must be added extremely sparingly at first until it comes together, then poured in a small but steady stream.

Voila! Suddenly, you have mayonnaise. Proud of your culinary accomplishment, you place the mayo in the fridge. That's out of the way and now you can read the Sunday paper with your coffee till lunchtime.

Lunchtime arrives and you assemble the sandwich necessities. But when you retrieve the mayo, you notice something is wrong. Instead of a smooth, creamy consistency, there are little puddles of oil separated from the primary mass.

The mayonnaise "broke" as we in the culinary world would say. What went wrong and can you fix it? Take out your notebooks class; Emulsions 101 is now in session.

Mayonnaise, milk, cream, butter, Hollandaise sauce, vinaigrettes, sauce Béarnaise, etc., are all emulsions. An emulsion is a blending of fat, usually oil or dairy fat, and a liquid, usually water based, whereby tiny, even microscopic droplets of the one are dispersed in the other.

The tinier the droplets the creamier and more stable the emulsion. The problem with emulsions is their constituents are resistant to intermingling. Oil and water do not mix.

Once brought together their chemical properties exert notable effort to separate and recombine into their component parts. But there are two types of ammo in this shotgun wedding to make the marriage work.

The first is agitation. If you combine oil and vinegar in a jar and shake it vigorously you'll establish an emulsion. However, this fusion is temporary. Left to its own devices it will separate in no time.

• page 1 of 2
• next page