Food

A Plea to Consider Mayo, From a Mayo Hater

Mayonnaise is best when you don't realize you're eating it.
Bettina Makalintal
Brooklyn, US
GettyImages-74867303-spoonful-of-mayonnaise
Photo by Glowimages via Getty Images

As far as Being a Brand Online goes, it's gotta be hard to be Hellmann's. Making something as maligned as mayonnaise seem "cool" and "relevant" online seems sort of like Sisyphus pushing a giant tub of oil-and-vinegared eggs up a hill under the hot sun, only to curdle and cook just like the potato salad in that episode of The Office. Mayo—if you ask me and the estimated 20 percent of Americans who also dislike it—deserves its detractors, for the most part; it's stinky, jiggly, off-white gloop.

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And yet, poor Hellmann's doesn't deserve the dog-piling on a recent tweet that suggested putting mayo in chocolate cake. To this, people responded "I'm Calling [sic] the cops," "No," and a clip of a person yelling "Police!" Here's the thing: Secret mayo is actually good.

Mayo is best when you don't really know that it's there—when it's added to dishes in a way that its thick, globular presence doesn't make itself immediately known. Chances are, even if you're a mayo hater, you've probably eaten something with secret mayo and enjoyed it. Putting mayo in cake batter, for example, is a common and long-standing practice that goes back to at least the Great Depression, when bakers tried to make do without an amply supply of butter and milk, though today it's simply used to retain tenderness and moisture.

The caveat here, of course, is that this practice is bad for vegans and anyone with an egg allergy, both parties who certainly benefit from transparency of ingredients. For everyone else, though, I'd bet that the mayo aversion is due to the immediate, off-putting mental associations, and without that, mayo's actually fine.

The addition of mayo helps in plenty of foods beyond cake. Many of us might have been told—to our wide-eyed shock—that the trick to a perfect grilled cheese is actually smearing mayo on the outside instead of butter, a verdict corroborated by the esteemed folks at Cooks Illustrated. Abra Berens, chef and author of Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables, has suggested mayo as a way of simplifying the process of breading eggplant for baking or frying. Instead of the standard dredge, she brushes eggplant with mayo and then stamps those slices into breadcrumbs. What's grosser: mayo, or your sticky hands after breading with flour, egg, and then flour again?

Even J. Kenji López-Alt, the well-respected and deeply trusted food science and cooking expert and author of the Food Lab, considers mayo his secret ingredient, especially when it comes to meat. After seeing a trend within the sous vide cooking community of rubbing meat with mayo before searing it, López-Alt recently wrote in the New York Times, he followed suit and found overwhelmingly positive results.

This, he wrote, is because mayo is mostly fat, which makes it a "great delivery mechanism for the fat-soluble flavor compounds found in many aromatics, while leaving behind no distinct flavor of its own." Because of its thick, viscous texture, mayo spreads easily onto meat and doesn't move around much, unlike other marinades, and because it boosts protein and fat, it can increase browning but prevent burning.

Mayo, basically, is magic, and part of the magic is that it works best when you don't have to think about the fact that you're eating it. So, as much as your brain might not want you to, you really should consider the mayo. Just hold your nose if you have to.