Homemade mayo – your best friend if eating keto

Why would you make mayo, when it’s so easy to buy? Because what makes the difference between good, healthy mayo and toxic crap is mainly the oils that are used.

Wikipedia says:

Mayonnaise, informally mayo, is a thick cold sauce or dressing usually used in sandwiches and composed salads. It is a stable emulsion of oil, egg yolk, and acid, either vinegar or lemon juice. There are many variants using additional flavorings.

You wouldn’t think that could be mucked up too much, would you? But sadly, it can be. Look at the labels, and you will see horrors like canola oil, pasteurised egg yolk, and sugar. Sugar? WTF? Just kidding, you know that shit is in everything, don’t you? One brand even has Calcium Disodium Edta (to maintain flavour).

But really it is incredibly easy to make, and the only thing I’m going to talk about that isn’t on every mayo recipe on the internet is the quality of the oils.

Traditionally, mayo is often made with olive oil, but that does give it a very strong taste, which not everybody cares for. This is what has led to milder oils being used. Canola oil and soybean oil are the worst. But even sunflower oil is very high in omega 6, so you wouldn’t want to use just that.

If we make our own, we can use oils that are higher in monounsaturated or saturated fats. See my post about good vs bad fats here.

So which fats should I use?

Disregarding flavour for the moment, healthy fats or oils to use can include:

• Extra virgin olive oil
• Light tasting olive oil tastes better, but may not be as nutritious
• Coconut oil
• Bacon fat
• MCT oil - see my previous post on why it's good for keto here
• Hemp oil
• Avocado oil
• Macadamia oil

Which have I tried?

For keto, I wanted to get a reasonable amount of MCT oil, to help my ketosis. But as it can be a bit of a laxative, if you have too much, I wanted to add in other oils.

• My first batch was ½ MCT oil, ¼ avocado, ¼ olive oil and that tasted pretty good.
• My second batch was 2/3 MCT oil, 1/6 hemp and 1/6 olive and that was good too.
• My third batch was ½ MCT oil, ¼ hemp, ¼ olive oil and that was quite strong tasting.

So I think I prefer avocado oil to hemp, and you want to be sure you’ve got a nice tasting olive oil.

I haven’t tried macadamia oil, but might try that in my next batch.

Ingredients

This is for a smallish batch that you can make up in a 500ml jar. If you make a double mix, you’ll need a 1 litre jar.

• 1 x whole, free range egg
• 1 x free range egg yolk
• 2 Tablespoons lemon juice
• ½ teaspoon sea salt
• 1 cup of your chosen oil mix
• Extra flavourings of your choice like mustard powder or some spices

Note that you need healthy, free range, grass fed eggs if you’re going to eat them raw. If you are in any doubt about the health of your eggs, you can pasteurise them. Put enough water in a saucepan to cover the eggs. Heat to about 60 °C/ 140 °F. Carefully place the eggs into the saucepan and keep them there for about 3 minutes. Let the eggs cool down before using in your mayo.

Process

I made the first batch in the blender, but it was hard to get it all out. So I prefer using an immersion (stick) blender and making it in the jar it will be stored in.

First put everything except the oil into your jar – after checking that your stick blender will fit in!

Give it a zizz with the blender till mixed.

Mix your oils together in a mixing jug.

Set the blender going, holding it with your left hand, and start dribbling in the oil from the jug with your right hand. I might have put a towel under the jar to make sure it didn’t slip. No photos of this bit as my hands were fully occupied!

As the oil is incorporated, you can drizzle it in a bit faster, and once it starts to thicken up, you can pour the rest in on top and move the blender up and down in the jar to gradually blend it in. It should only take a few minutes.

Take out the blender wand, and scrape as much as you can back into the jar.

Typically you would expect it to be a rich yellow, from the egg yolks. Mine is quite green looking in this picture, maybe because of the light. But in the photos at the top and bottom of the post, it looks a bit more normal!

Keep it in the fridge except when you’re dishing it up, and it should keep for a few weeks. Not sure how many, but I made my last batch before Xmas and it’s still fine.

Food diary for Fri, 4th Jan

I’ll keep on briefly reporting on what I’ve been eating, mainly so you can see that although the keto diet sounds extreme, what I’m eating is really not that strange.

Goal

Holidays are over, and my goal is to release an extra 1.5 kilos of excess body fat over the next couple of months, so my calories are down a bit from maintenance levels. I’m not in a hurry, so my calories are only down a little bit from the 1800 I was eating late last year.

• Calories = 1650
• Protein = 105 grams
• Carbs = 24 grams
• Fat = roughly 125 grams

Menu

Breakfast:

• Strawberry smoothie (same as blueberry, except 55gm frozen strawberries)
• ½ teaspoon cod liver oil

Lunch

• 3 free range eggs, scrambled with 13gm butter & 36gm tasty cheddar
• 10 grams pork rinds
• 30 grams fresh, organic blueberries (which came to 16)

Note: I did get hungry a bit earlier, so the eggs are not as satisfying for me as fish or meat.

Dinner

Chicken salad, made with:
• 2 x chicken drumsticks = about 120gm meat
• 25 grams fermented ginger carrots
• 50 grams kohl rabi
• 30 grams homemade mayo

This is what the ingredients looked like before I mixed them up.

Note: I’ve been getting an increasing bad lower back ache over the last few days, and I’m not prone to back pain. By this morning I was hobbling round like an old lady. I’m suspecting a reaction to the kohl rabi, which is a bummer as I’ve been enjoying the crunch of it. So I’ll have to avoid that for a few days and see what happens.

Totals

• Calories = 1644
• Protein = 106 grams = 26%
• Carbs = 21 grams = 5%
• Fat = 124 grams = 68%

Thanks for reading.

Photos by me.

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