AIP egg-free mayonnaise: a coconut cream and avocado oil emulsion in 5 minutes

You went looking at the label on the jar, and that is how most people end up here. Nearly every mayonnaise on the shelf is built on soybean or canola oil, and once you have read the back of enough jars, making your own stops feeling like extra work and starts feeling like the simpler option.

It is 5 ingredients and about 5 minutes. Avocado oil carries the body of it, a source of monounsaturated fat and vitamin E, and the fat is doing more than making it creamy, because fat-soluble vitamins, A, E, and K among them, appear to be better absorbed in the presence of fat. Full-fat coconut cream does the emulsifying work an egg yolk usually does. Fresh lemon juice keeps it tasting like mayonnaise rather than sweet cream, and it brings a little vitamin C along with it.

There is something worth slowing down for in a condiment made from 5 things you can name out loud. You are doing the harder version of eating, most days without much company in it. A jar of something good that you made yourself, sitting in the door of the refrigerator, is a small piece of that effort paying you back.

Two details decide whether it emulsifies. Everything starts genuinely warm enough, and the oil goes in slowly. Coconut fat is solid below about 76F, so cream straight from a cool kitchen seizes instead of blending. It should pour off a spoon before you start. And oil poured in fast will break it, so give it a slow minute.

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup full-fat coconut cream, warm enough to pour off a spoon (the thick cream from a chilled can, or a can labeled coconut cream)
• 1/2 cup avocado oil
• 2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
• 1 tsp apple cider vinegar
• 1/2 tsp sea salt
• Optional: 1/4 tsp garlic powder

Method

Put the coconut cream, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, sea salt, and the garlic powder if you are using it into a tall container with enough room to pour alongside the blender shaft. The beaker that came with your immersion blender is the right shape. If the cream is stiff or grainy, stand the container in warm water for 5 minutes first and stir until it pours smoothly.

Blend the base for 10 seconds, until it is smooth and slightly loosened.

With the blender running and the head near the bottom, add the avocado oil in a thin, steady stream down the side of the container. This is the step that decides it. Pour slowly enough that the oil disappears as it goes, about 60 seconds for the full 1/2 cup. The mixture pales and thickens as you go.

Taste and adjust. It usually wants a little more salt, and sometimes another teaspoon of lemon juice.

Yield: About 1 cup.

How to use it

• Fold through the layered chicken salad
• Spoon over the roasted beet salad
• Bind the Mediterranean tuna burgers and their sauce at Mediterranean Tuna Burgers
• Use in the classic tuna salad at Classic Tuna Salad
• Serve as the dip alongside the curly sweet potato fries at Curly Sweet Potato Fries

Troubleshooting

If it stays thin and soupy, the emulsion has broken, usually because the oil went in too fast or the cream was still cold. It is recoverable. Pour the broken mixture into a measuring cup, put 1 tbsp of fresh coconut cream in the clean container, and blend the broken mixture back into it in a slow stream, the same way you added the oil.

If it is thicker than you want, blend in warm water 1 teaspoon at a time.

If it tastes flat, it needs salt before it needs anything else. Add 1/8 tsp, blend for 2 seconds, and taste again.

A note on the garlic

Garlic powder rather than a fresh clove is deliberate. Fresh garlic held in a high-fat, low-acid mixture in the refrigerator is the one combination worth avoiding here, and dried garlic gives you the flavor without that question. If you want fresh garlic in it, grate it in just before serving and eat that batch the same day.

Storage

Refrigerator: keeps for up to 5 days in a sealed glass jar. Coconut cream firms up when it is cold, so this sets much thicker in the refrigerator than it looks in the jar. Let it stand at room temperature for 10 minutes and stir before using.

Freezing is not recommended. The emulsion separates on thawing and does not come back.

*Original ARM recipe*