Sunday, February 15, 2009

Soy Milk Mayonnaise

Soy Milk Mayonnaise

Maybe some of you have heard of macrobiotic diet or macrobiotics? It's becoming more and more popular here in Japan. I don't know much about it at the moment, and probably would not go too deeply into it in the future, either. But macrobiotics seems to suggest many healthier substitution ideas, which I welcome very, very much. Recently I have been doing a net search on such ideas not only for myself but also for my parents who I will be cooking for in the near future.

I didn't know this before, but a good number of people here in Japan are on this macrobiotic diet now and trying those substitution ideas. I bet some of the ideas make you go "Yuuuuck! But I should put up with it because it's supposed to be healthy..." and others make you give thumbs-up.

It looks like yogurt in these photos, but the real color is more yellowish.

Now here is this idea of using soy milk in place of egg yolks to make mayonnaise. Almost all Japanese posts about this mayonnaise I read praised it, except the ones who used olive oil. So I thought it was a right bandwagon to jump on ;) This morning, as soon as I finished breakfast, I made an experimental batch based on a recipe (Japanese) I found last night.

Mmmmm.... I give a thumb up to this idea. The taste and the texture are pretty close to real mayonnaise, I think. (I used food processor to whip it up well.) When I first licked it, I thought the salt and vinegar tasted too sharp for me. But it was alright when I tried it on sliced tomatoes.

Then later I found out that the idea was already popular outside Japan among vegan people, and hundreds of English recipes of "vegan mayonnaise" are out there on the net. How nice.

It seems that vegetarian or vegan diet did not make a great breakthrough in Japan right after it became popular abroad, though Japanese people have been crazy about losing weight for decades. Then now, the needs of young moms with atopic kids, as well as the growing interest in the prevention of cancer or metabolic syndrome, brought macrobiotics into the spotlight, which lead to the introduction of many vegan recipes in Japan. Macrobiotics and veganism are not exactly the same, but they seem to suggest many similar recipes. I could be wrong, but to me it seems that way.

And some say that the vegan diet is actually close to the common Japanese diet before the period of rapid economic growth. So now the macrobiotic chefs must be combining Western knowledge with the good traditional Japanese diet. How nice it is to be able to share the benefit through books and the Internet. :)

Anyway, the experiment today was a success. The only thing was that I got so carried away that I forgot to reduce the recipe to half, and ended up with plenty of mayo. AHHHH...!!!
The soy milk mayonnaise is said to keep for about two weeks in the fridge, but I don't know if I can use this up in two weeks...

When I make the next batch, I might try coloring it to make it look more yellowish. No, not by using termeric. I'm thinking something less expensive... IIRC, Laura Ingalls's Ma would color her homemade butter by using grated carrots, right? I think I read that in Little House on the Prairie... or was it in Little House in the Big Woods? Anyway, I may give it a try next time. ;)

P.S. * This does not sound very healthy, but I always drink or use the soy milk with additives. I don't like the taste of pure soy milk...


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13 comments:

SkyJuice said...

The mayo looks good. I love soy. Please have some on my behalf, will you? :-)

Anonymous said...

I love that you've read Little House in the Big Woods! Yes, she used grated carrots....you'd have to strain them out though, right? Wouldn't want carrot-y mayo!

I should try that...But, I don't really eat a lot of mayo (just on sandwiches.) Or I could just eat a lot of sandwiches for a few weeks, ne? ^_^

Anonymous said...

Obachan, I like mayo very much, but it has very high calori that I can't work properly after consuming it. Do you know by any chance if this mayo really has significant lower calori than the normal one?

K and S said...

sounds like an great concoction!

obachan said...

SkyJuice
OK, I will. ;)

Tindy
I make only a small amount of mayo so I guess I can just squeeze a pinch of grated carrot to get the juice out, ne?

It's good that you don't use too much mayo in the first place.

Yudy
Tell you the truth, there are many Japanese websites listing the calories of regular mayo and soy milk mayo to claim that soy milk version is really low-cal. But most of them do not tell where they got the data or how they calculated the calories. So I'll show you something official.
Here is the food composition table by our government, and you can get some ideas by seeing the tables for the mayonnaise ingredients such as "EGGS" and "FATS AND OILS." The calorie data may surprise you, but don't forget to see the cholesterol data, too.
(Maybe lots of so-called "low-cal dishes" here are actually "low-cholesterol" dishes???)

Kat
Yeah, I hope it's not shomething that's cooked up. ;)

Anonymous said...

This has nothing to do with the mayo, but I realized today just how long I have been enjoying your blog and how many people I have recommended it to, so I wanted to thank you for all your time and effort. It is really inspirational to see someone on the other side of the world cook such a wide variety of food so skillfully. So, thank you!

obachan said...

OMG, thank you so much. I'm so flattered.

I'm not that skillful, but maybe my advantage is that I'm familiar with Japanese cooking sites and magazines, so I can give you some ideas of what's popular there. ;)

Kirsty Girl said...

I wonder if my husband would like this. Like many Japanese, he puts mayo on almost everything. I hate mayo but love almost everything soy. I think I'll have to try it.

Kirsty Girl said...

btw, is it called 戸乳マヨ?

Serendipity 2017 said...

Another fan of your blog here! I've been enjoying your blog for a year now. It kept be company while I was preggy last year, and now that the baby is out,I still drop by sometimes.

Just the other day, Hanamaru Market featured ways to cut down on calories. One way was to make tofu mayonnaise (tofu, lemon, shoyu, a little salt and pepper... just mix it all up).

I'd love to try yours too soon (I hope ;) ).

obachan said...

Kristy Girl
Sorry I didn't respond sooner. Have you tried this out? It's probably 豆乳マヨ.

If your husband is a real mayoraa, he might say that it's not like real mayonnaise. But if the proportion of the seasoning was adjusted to suit his taste (I had to reduce the amount of salt-- maybe because I used 調整豆乳, soy milk with additives), I think your husband may rate it OK, if not great. Oh, but for me it was really important to give it more yellowish color. I think the visual effect has more influence on appetite than we can imagine. I squeezed some grated carrot to color it, and it was perfect for me.

Megumi's Mumblings
Thanks and keep coming back, please. :)

I haven't tried tofu mayo, but I did try out tofu cream once. It was OK... but it just smelled too much like tofu, which I wasn't too crazy about. So I might feel the same way about tofu mayo...

Anonymous said...

I love soy mayo!

Anonymous said...

i am wondering if it is possible to post the link or recipe again. Somehow the link doesnt direct me to recipe. Thank u so much