Taking all the animal products out of my cooking has prompted me to make a lot of things that I’d never even attempted a non-vegan version of. Case in point: Mayonnaise. Before my plant based ways I would’ve had a bottle of pre-made mayo in my fridge for the occasional tuna sandwich and such but it would never have occurred to me to make it from scratch. I remember once reading that it was complicated and prone to curdling and frankly that was enough to put me off making it for good.

Skip forward and I now find myself in the market for a vegan friendly mayo. I’m eating  a lot of potatoes (well, chips) and mayo seems like an appealing addition to my vegan condiment selcetion. Amazingly I found one straight away in my local Sainsburys’, and although it was ok in the taste department, it wasn’t really setting my world on fire, you know what I’m mean?

Thus I was sufficiently prodded into action to make it myself. Nothing like greed to motive you, eh? And thank goodness I did as not only is this mayonnaise ridiculously easy to make but it tastes so, so good. Honestly I don’t even remember how regular mayo differs from this stuff as I certainly don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. It’s rich and creamy and as it’s homemade has no weird preservatives or numbers or any of that nonsense. This means I gleefully spoon it onto everything with a total disregard for the fact that it does still contain a fair bit of oil and is certainly far from a health food. But life is too short to worry about a few spoonfuls of delicious mayo!

This mayo can form the base of creamy salad dressings or you can use it for potato salad or coleslaw. It’s also pretty adaptable, I’ve added some variations below, but by and large my favourite is to add garlic to make it an aioli, great with homemade patatas bravas (there I go with the potatoes again!) It keeps pretty well in the fridge too, I’ve certainly never had a problem of it going bad before I am able to eat it all.

Easy Vegan Mayo

Makes: One jar (approx 300ml)

Prep time: 10 minutes

Ingredients:

• 200ml organic soya milk
• 1 tbsp fresh lemon juice
• 1 heaped tsp dijon mustard
• 1 tsp flaky salt (or 1/2 tsp fine salt)
• 130-170ml rapeseed or other flavourless oil

Method:

1. Add all ingredients to a blender aside from the oil and blend quickly until smooth.
2. Measure out the oil into a jug and very slowly trickle 3/4 of the oil into the blender with the motor running on low to medium. It should be a very thin stream, so will take you a minute or so. If you don’t have a freestanding blender you can also use a hand held immersion blender and a narrow container – just follow the same instructions, going slow adding the oil as usual.
3. The mixture will all of a sudden thicken up as the oil becomes incorporated. Sometimes this happens with 130ml of oil and sometimes it takes a little more, go slow and keep adding, pausing in-between to see if it has thickened up, stopping the blender and dipping a spoon in to check if needed.
4. When it is done it should be thick enough to completely coat a spoon when dipped in but won’t look totally ‘set’. Carefully pour and scrape the mayo into a clean jar and place in the fridge – it will thicken up after a few hours of chilling and become more solid.
5. The mayonnaise will keep for about 10 days in the fridge.

Variations:

• Aioli: add 1-2 cloves of garlic to the bender at the beginning
• Chilli Mayo: mix in 1 tbsp of sriacha or sweet chilli sauce at the end
• Basil Mayo: add a handful of fresh basil at the end and blend to combine