As Epicurious’s senior mayonnaise correspondent (self-appointed, but still), I was assigned to try out a couple of the new eggless mayos that are currently attracting so much attention. These are hot times in the vegan-mayo market, aswe mentioned recently. A California company calledHampton Creek, which producesJust Mayo, has attracted funding from no less than Bill Gates and Peter Thiel. (The dude is seriouslyall over the place, right? But we commend his interest in animal-free condiments). Its foundertold theWashington Postthat eggs are bad for the body, bad for chickens, bad for the environment—why not go egg-free? So fine, fine, fine. #DisruptMayonnaise. But are these eggless alternatives any good?
Our experiment consisted of two new brands: Just Mayo and Sir Kensington'sFabanaise. Just Mayo, which emerged victorious in a legal battlewith the egg industryregarding whether or not it could even call itself mayonnaise, replaces egg yolks with pea protein. The makers of Fabanaise rely on the mysteriously effective emulsifier aquafaba, the chickpea-cooking byproduct that's spent much of 2016 taking the internet by storm. (Fabanaise's makers, who've also attracted a handsome amount of venture funding, procure their aquafaba from an Upstate New York hummus maker, in an admirably#wastelessarrangement.)
The two debutantes were measured against a veteran vegan mayo—Whole Foods’ 365 brand—and, as a control,Hellmann'sclassic egg-enhanced mayonnaise.Serious Eats already tested the vegan mayos with potato salad,, so we needed to go deeper. After all, we use mayo for way more than deli salads. But first things first—potato salad.
I made four batches ofpotato salad, testing them with Hellmann's classic, Just Mayo, Fabanaise, and the old-school Whole Foods vegan mayo. All the varieties work fine except for Whole Foods-brand vegan mayo, which has problems straight out of the gate/jar: it looks grainy and, frankly, revolting. The potato salad that it dresses tastes conspicuously bad: the mayo imparts a weird sweetness that tastes to me artificial, though it’s actually from brown rice syrup. (“Artificial” probably being the brain’s interpretation of an alarm message from my tastebuds: “WTF is this brown rice syrup doing in my mayonnaise.”) It’s the kind of thing that people who are not vegan think that vegan substitutes are like: just inferior knockoffs of the original.
The only problem now is figuring out what the hell to do with all this vegan potato salad taking up space in the fridge.
You know aboutthe grilled-cheese trick: Slathering your sandwiches on the outside with mayo, rather than butter, for an extra-crisp crust? It’s based on the same principle that led Epi contributor Paula Forbes to realize that leftover potato saladmakes great crispy roasted potatoes—namely, that mayo is mostly fat, and making things crunchy is one of the things that fat does pretty well. (All of the vegan mayos I tested here are identical to Hellmann’s in fat content.) And it definitely works with both Fabanaise and Just Mayo, which deliver superlative grilled-cheese sandwiches.
Next, I embarked on the simplest and perhaps most challenging test: Tasting the mayo straight, as a dip for French fries (fromShake Shack自然地)。Fabanaise略有宽松consistency and a paler color than Just Mayo, which is thicker and tinted a more classic mayo yellow.
A tasting panel of two (me, my boyfriend) ended up preferring Fabanaise to Just Mayo, since it has a brighter, tangier flavor—it's theDuke’s Mayonnaiseto Just Mayo’s Hellmann’s, if you feel me. My boyfriend even likes Fabanaisemorethan the Hellmann’s, which is totally not an outlandish opinion to have in this situation: Both of these options are almost completely indistinguishable from old-fashioned mayonnaise. They are both delicious.
I was ready to close up shop and declare both these vegan mayos 100 percent successful: 10/10, would slather on fries again, and happily. But everybody at work got really intense about the fact that we needed to see if these new vegan mayos would work in achocolate mayonnaise cake. So the Epi test kitchen made three cakes, based on a recipe available at theDuke’s Mayonnaise website: unlike some mayonnaise cakes, in which the mayo stands in for the fat, here it stands in for the eggs, too, resulting in a completely vegan cake. (Recipes like these, which do suggest a sense of desperation, hark back to the Great Depression.) Would Fabanaise and Just Mayo perform?
And how. They overperformed! The Fabanaise cake was slightly saltier than the other two, but the two vegan mayo cakes were the clear favorites here, in both texture and taste. Hellmann's mayonnaise cake was slightly richer, but had a more "off" flavor. So color me a next-wave vegan-mayo convert. To whom do I mail my $1 million investment?
