THE Mayo is a mixture widely used in the preparation of various foods. Surely you have already tasted it or are you a person who makes a lot of use of this heterogeneous mixture (classified as colloid), right?
The purpose of this text is to teach you how to prepare your own mayonnaise at home and, above all, show the chemistry involved in this process. For this, some recommendations are needed:
prepare mayonnaise under adult supervision;
wash hands thoroughly before preparation;
follow the recipe that will be proposed;
once ready, keep the mayonnaise in the refrigerator and consume it within a maximum of three days.
To mayonnaise preparation, we will need the following Ingredients:
1 tablespoon of lemon juice (made just by squeezing the fruit into the spoon) or 1 tablespoon of vinegar;
3 teaspoons of water;
1 raw egg;
1 cup of soybean oil;
1 teaspoon of salt;
1 teaspoon of mustard.
Preparation mode:
Place the egg in a blender with three tablespoons of the oil in the cup, water, salt, mustard and lemon juice. Then, beat the mixture on high speed and slowly add the rest of the oil. You should beat the mixture until it looks creamy.
Observation: If you want the mayonnaise to look more consistent, do not add egg whites.
How is Chemistry involved in the preparation of mayonnaise?
You could see that the preparation of mayonnaise at home is simple and does not involve any complexity, right? But what is the explanation that Chemistry gives us about all this?
The explanation is simple: While the presence of salt in the preparation only serves to influence the flavor of the mayonnaise, the egg and lemon juice or vinegar are essential for the process. This is because oil and water do not mix, meaning that one does not dissolve the other. In egg yolk there is a substance called lecithin, which is a surfactant, that is, it has an affinity for both oil and water. Thus, egg lecithin acts as a bridge connecting the water molecule to the oil molecule. Mustard also has surface-active substances, so it can be used in the preparation. The need for lemon juice or vinegar is due to the fact that these products have acids (citrus in lemon and acetic in vinegar) which give greater stability to the substances surfactants.
Knowing all this, how about calling your parents and spending a moment in the kitchen enjoying the chemical knowledge of mayonnaise?
By Me. Diogo Lopes Dias
