I was thinking of making mayo for sandwiches to get me through the winter and was wondering if I could make fairly large batches that would keep for a long period of time with the aid food grade citric acid. Here's the problem I have never done this before with any sauces besides tomato sauce were you dissolve about 1 Tbsp citric acid per quart of tomato sauce, so I"m assuming since I'm making a preservative based liquid I should dissolve 1 Tbsp per quart of boiling water?
How much citric acid should I use to preserve mayonnaise on a cups/ml ratio
food-preservationfood-safetyfood-science
Related Solutions
Nope. The only way you can really preserve things at home for room temperature storage is by canning in a boiling water bath or pressure cooker, and the heat from that will break the emulsion of your mayonnaise, completely ruining it. On top of this, mayonnaise will also tend to break at room temperature, so it won't work even if you make it safe.
Commercial mayonnaise uses pasteurized ingredients (in particular the eggs), and presumably the manufacturing process takes additional steps to avoid recontamination before it gets sealed up in jars. It also has additional stabilizers to keep it from breaking while sitting around at room temperature. The result is apparently shelf-stable, but even if you add emulsifiers/stabilizers to yours and get it to not break during shipping, I would be really hesitant to assume you've gotten it as bacteria-proof as the commercial stuff.
If the glasses are at all damp, it may make sense to store them up-side-down. In bars and restaurants, you often see plastic mesh like this:
That webbing lines trays, shelves and the area beside the sink for drying dishes. The mesh keeps the dishes or glasses, which may still be damp, from actually touching the surface they're sitting on. In the case of glasses, it also keeps the glasses from forming a seal to the surface beneath. That mesh often gets cleaned, as does the surface under them. In that case, it makes sense to store glasses up-side-down.
Do you have mesh lining your cabinet? Are the cabinet shelves wiped down regularly?
If not, it is far more sanitary to store your glasses right-side-up, and to be sure that they are dry before they are put away.
Related Topic
- How much citric acid to use to preserve vegetarian jelly
- I am attempting to preserve the shelf life of ice tea up to six months with citric acid, I need a perfected ratio
- How much citric acid is safe to use
- Baking – How to add citric acid to the hard candy without it burning
- How much citric acid to preserve the juice
- How to make the sauces shelf stable, other than adding acid into it since the recipe doesn’t include much of it
- Why don’t some Italian tomato sauces and pastes use citric acid
Best Answer
First, don't make assumptions based on other recipes. Food safety is so complicated, not even the specialists try to predict anything. They test recipes empirically until they have found ones that work. Of course they take guesses at what is likely to work, but they only know after they've made and measured it.
Luckily, people have tested recipes for longer life mayonnaise. The result is that you have to use 1 gram of acid and 15 g of water per yolk. You also have to pasteurize the yolks, which means that you need to get them above 65 Celsius during the mayonnaise making stage. The curdling temperature of yolks is changed by the acidity and the speed of heating, with this ratio, it occurs somewhere between 82 and 88 Celsius. So you really have to be very accurate when producing the longer-shelf-life mayonnaise, using both a thermometer and a high-sensitivity scale (don't measure by volume!). I suggest reading the whole document on safe mayonnaise making here, it is quite informative.
Your idea for "large batches to get me through the winter" probably still won't work, though. First, I wouldn't keep this mayonnaise indefinitely long. It only gives you a 5D reduction for salmonella, and of course you still get bacterial contamination of other species after the mayo is made. They may be slow to grow with all the acid and in the fridge temperature, but they still grow. Also you have mold and plain old quality problems such as rancidity and lactic fermentation. The authors of that article only confirmed the safety for 4 weeks.
Second, you can't be scaling the recipe indefinitely to make one large batch. As you saw above, you need a very tight temperature control. If you were to dump a dozen of yolks into the bowl, and then add 12 cups of oil, no burner will be able to maintain constant temperature throughout the emulsion, especially once you have enough air in it that conduction slows down. 3 yolks are normal for a batch, up to 5 can be done well, above that it becomes quite difficult.
Third, you might find out that you simply don't like it. This mayonnaise should have a pH of 3.5 or below. This is not yet pickle-taste territory, but it's still very sour. If you don't enjoy mayonnaise which tastes of citric acid foremost, you might find out that you don't want to do acid preservation.