FOOD SPECIAL..... The Mayo Boom

 The Mayo Boom 

How an unfamiliar salad dressing suddenly became a rage in the Indian market

Flavouring the mayonnaise offered restaurants and food companies the perfect opportunity to add new tastes at minimal cost

It may be a generational thing but mayonnaise formed no part of my growing years. We never made it at home (did anyone in India, I wonder) and we never bought bottles of the ready-made stuff from the grey market (food imports were banned in those days).

SAUCY DETAILS In the 1990s, global fast food companies arrived in India and that’s how mayonnaise entered the diet of India 

Frankly, I don’t think I even knew what mayonnaise was till I was 10 and noticed that the school’s rock band was called The Mayonnaise. I assumed, reasonably enough, that the band was named after the school and was surprised when an obviously more sophisticated classmate told me that the name was actually a pun.

Newly aware that such a salad sauce existed, I began looking out for it. I found it when we travelled abroad. The French dipped their chips (as in French Fries) in mayonnaise (they still don’t know how to make good tomato ketchup); the English made a puddle of mayonnaise around hard-boiled eggs and served the dish as an appetiser: Egg Mayonnaise. But in India, the only places I ever saw it were five star hotel buffets and the homes of rich vegetarian relatives, where a Russian Salad (disgusting vegetables mixed with mayonnaise) would be considered a great ‘Continental’ delicacy along with “Baked Dish” (disgusting vegetables cooked with white sauce).

So, imagine my surprise now that I see that mayonnaise has become one of the most popular and fastest-growing sauces in India! Later generations were obviously more exposed to mayonnaise than I was. And such is Indian ingenuity that this French sauce, popularised by American food companies, is mainly supplied to the Indian market by two domestic food companies (Cremica and Veeba) whose sales far exceed those of foreign multinationals who have tried to flog their bottled mayonnaise in India. What’s more, the Indian market has developed to the extent that Veeba, for instance, manufactures and markets over 50 different kinds of mayonnaise.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. First of all, what is mayonnaise?

There are two answers to this question. One, given by ordinary consumers, is that it is a creamy, light yellow sauce that you put on salad or use as a sandwich spread. The second, given by foodie types, is that it is a miracle of nature: an emulsion of two substances – oil and water – which do not normally go together.

Though there are numerous recipes for mayonnaise, the principle is the same. You put egg yolks in a bowl with some seasoning. Then you keep adding oil in little driblets and stirring till you have a thick pale yellow sauce. At the very end, you add a little acid (vinegar, white wine etc.). And that’s pretty much about it.

The ‘miracle of nature’ stuff has to do with the emulsion (the opposite of a solution). In recent years, molecular chefs and food scientists have created a little industry out of explaining why a mayonnaise emulsion is stable. It’s because the egg yolks contain protein which helps emulsify (and stabilise) the water from the egg (about 50 per cent of yolk is water) with the oil.

All of this is of little interest to us except for one vital scientific fact: the chief contributions of the egg to mayonnaise are water and protein (which is 15 per cent of the yolk).

Suppose you were to add water and some other (non-egg) protein to oil. Could you still make something like a mayonnaise?

Yes, you could. Some early mayonnaise recipes call for meat protein rather than egg. But could you do it with a vegetarian protein?

The answer to this question is worth thousands of crores because, if you can use vegetarian proteins, then you can create an eggless mayonnaise. And once you have an eggless, totally vegetarian product, you have the keys to the Indian market.

In the mid-1990s, Indian companies called Cremica and Fun Food (since sold to a multinational) experimented with making mayonnaise with milk protein. When they succeeded, they had created a mayonnaise that all Indian restaurants could serve without fear of offending vegetarian sensibilities.

When people eat a fast food sandwich, they respond most clearly to the wet, sloppy, saucy flavour between the meat (or aloo patty) and the bun. So, the trick is to get the sauces right because they are the key to the flavour profile. (Try eating a fast food burger without the sauce. It tastes of cardboard.)

But why, I hear you ask, would Indians want to eat mayonnaise anyway? It is hardly a vital part of the Indian diet.

Ah, but the Indian diet is changing faster than we realise.

HT21JAN18