Add Bacon Fat To Your Homemade Mayo And Thank Us Later

You may have seen it on grocery store shelves, manufactured by big brands or packaged by smaller, more niche makers: Baconnaise. This hybrid condiment is intended to taste exactly like what it sounds like, bacon-infused mayonnaise, but mass-market versions are often made with bacon-adjacent flavorings, rather than anything closer to the real deal. But with just a little elbow (and, ahem, bacon) grease, you can make a more pure form of baconnaise in your very own kitchen.

Yes, you could simply mix a bit of mayo in with your cooled, strained bacon fat, but the resulting texture wouldn't be quite right. Making it from scratch is a relatively simple process that will leave your BLT guests disproportionately impressed. The challenge is to render enough bacon fat for the recipe to work, so next time you cook bacon — oven cooking bacon is one of the better and easier methods — collect that bacon grease and set it aside for your baconnaise. 

A typical mayonnaise recipe, as well as similarly enhanced variations like this or even a spicy mayo version, will include a neutral oil, two egg yolks, Dijon mustard, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and, if desired, a couple of garlic cloves. The magic's in the emulsification, the blending process that whips these ingredients into the marvelous condiment that it is. Baconnaise's trick is swapping some of the oil with — you guessed it! — some of that swine-y goodness.

You'll notice that grocery store packs of bacon aren't as uniform as they seem. Two seemingly identical 16-ounce envelopes might contain different numbers of strips, which means one 16-ounce batch might yield less than half a cup of grease, while the next gets a little more. Those standard mayonnaise recipes will call for one cup of oil. You're going to combine ideally about a half a cup of the bacon fat, straining it with a cheesecloth for optional smoothness, with your neutral oil, like canola. Toss that mix into the blender with the yolks, juice from half a lemon, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, pinch of salt and pepper, and optional alliums, blend until smooth, and prepare to perk up all your mayonnaise-incorporating preparations.