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House of Macadamias
House of Macadamias
Macadamia Oil Mayonnaise: The 2-Minute Seed Oil-Free Recipe

Macadamia Oil Mayonnaise: The 2-Minute Seed Oil-Free Recipe

You build a good salad, then you finish it with two tablespoons of soybean oil. That is what store-bought mayonnaise is. Soybean oil is the first ingredient in Hellmann's, Duke's and Kraft, and mayonnaise is about 80% oil by weight, which makes it the single most concentrated dose of seed oil most people eat all week.

Quick Answer: Homemade macadamia oil mayonnaise takes one egg, one cup of macadamia oil, lemon juice, mustard and salt, and about two minutes with an immersion blender. Macadamia oil works better than olive oil as a mayonnaise base because it is naturally mild and buttery instead of bitter, and it is 80% good fats with only about 2% of the inflammatory omega-6 fat found in seed oils, compared to 51% in the soybean oil used in most commercial mayonnaise.

Macadamia oil is the best base for mayonnaise, and it is a flavor argument first

Anyone who has tried making mayonnaise with extra virgin olive oil knows how it turns out. Bitter, sharp, a little metallic. That is not bad technique. Blending olive oil at high speed ruptures its structure and releases the polyphenols that give it its peppery bite, and in an emulsion those polyphenols taste harsh. It is the reason commercial "olive oil mayo" is quietly cut with canola and soybean oil.

Mayonnaise needs a neutral oil. That is the entire reason the industry landed on soybean oil in the first place. It carries no flavor of its own, so the egg, lemon and mustard come through clean.

Macadamia oil is the only genuinely neutral oil that is not a seed oil. It is soft and lightly buttery, closer to cream than to nuts, and most people cannot identify it in the finished mayonnaise at all. What you taste is mayonnaise. Not oil, not nuts, not bitterness.

Avocado oil is neutral too, which is why it dominates the clean mayo shelf. The problem is that you often are not buying avocado oil. UC Davis tested commercial avocado oils in 2020 and found 82% were rancid before their expiration date or cut with cheaper oils. In three cases, bottles labeled "pure" or "extra virgin" turned out to be close to 100% soybean oil. A 2024 follow-up on private label brands found only 31% were pure. There are still no enforceable standards for what avocado oil has to contain.

So you get the neutrality you need without the compromise you did not know you were making.

The recipe

Makes about 1¼ cups. Takes 2 minutes.

Ingredients

  • 1 cup (240ml) macadamia oil
  • 1 large whole egg, at room temperature
  • 1 tablespoon lemon juice, or apple cider vinegar
  • 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
  • ½ teaspoon fine sea salt

Method

  1. Crack the egg into a tall, narrow jar, one just wide enough for your immersion blender head to reach the bottom. A wide bowl will not work.
  2. Add the lemon juice, mustard and salt.
  3. Pour the macadamia oil on top and let everything settle for 30 seconds. The oil will sit in a layer above the egg.
  4. Push the immersion blender all the way to the bottom of the jar and blend without moving it. After 10 to 15 seconds the bottom third turns white and thick.
  5. Lift the blender slowly over the next 20 to 30 seconds, pulling the rest of the oil down into the emulsion as you go. Stop as soon as it is uniform.

Five ingredients. No calcium disodium EDTA, no added sugar, no "natural flavors."

Two details do the work. The egg has to be at room temperature, because a cold egg is the most common reason mayonnaise refuses to thicken. And the blender has to stay still at the bottom for those first 10 to 15 seconds, because that is what builds the base the rest of the oil binds to.

If it stays runny, it is not lost. Crack a fresh yolk into a clean jar and blend the broken mixture into it in a slow drizzle. It comes back.

What you actually removed

Seed oils are high in omega-6 fat, the one scientists call linoleic acid. It is the fat most associated with the inflammatory load of the modern American diet, and it is the reason the seed oil conversation exists at all.

Hellmann's proves the math on its own label. The jar declares 660mg of ALA per tablespoon. Soybean oil is about 6.6% ALA, so that figure back-calculates to almost exactly 10 grams of soybean oil per serving. The same 10 grams carries about 5 grams of omega-6.

Ranked from worst to best, by how much omega-6 a tablespoon of each delivers:

  1. Hellmann's Real Mayonnaise, made with soybean oil at 51% omega-6. About 5.1g per tablespoon.
  2. Homemade with canola oil, at roughly 19% omega-6. About 1.9g per tablespoon.
  3. Avocado oil mayo (Primal Kitchen, Chosen Foods), at 10 to 13% omega-6. About 1.0 to 1.3g per tablespoon.
  4. Homemade with extra virgin olive oil, at roughly 11% omega-6. About 1.1g per tablespoon.
  5. Homemade with macadamia oil, at roughly 2% omega-6. About 0.2g per tablespoon.

Figures assume the standard 10 grams of oil per tablespoon of mayonnaise. Soybean oil composition per Soy Connection; canola, olive and avocado per USDA FoodData Central; macadamia oil per House of Macadamias Certificates of Analysis and third-party lab testing. The full ranking across every common cooking fat is in our breakdown of which cooking oils are highest and lowest in omega-6.

Mediterranean style salad with macadamia oil dressing and homemade mayonnaise

What you added, which is the more interesting half

Removing the soybean oil makes mayonnaise neutral. What macadamia oil does next is make it useful.

Most of the vitamins worth eating a salad for are fat soluble. Carotenoids like lutein, lycopene and beta-carotene cannot cross into your bloodstream without fat present in the same meal. Researchers at Iowa State measured this directly in 2004: when subjects ate salads with fat-free dressing, carotenoid absorption was essentially zero. Not reduced. Zero.

The follow-up is the part that matters here. A Purdue team led by Mario Ferruzzi, published in Molecular Nutrition & Food Research in 2012, fed people salads dressed with saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats at three different levels. Monounsaturated fat came out ahead by a wide margin. It delivered the same carotenoid absorption at 3 grams of fat that it took 20 grams of the other fats to achieve.

Macadamia oil is around 80% monounsaturated fat, the highest of any common cooking oil. So a spoonful of macadamia mayonnaise on a chicken salad is not a compromise you make for taste. It is the thing that lets you absorb what is in the salad.

Macadamia oil also carries omega-7s, a rare fat that most oils contain almost none of, linked to metabolic health and to the skin's own collagen production. And because it is 80% good fats and low in the fragile ones, it is the most stable oil to leave sitting in a jar in your fridge. That stability is the same property that makes it hold up in a hot pan, which we covered in why macadamia oil stays stable at high heat.

That is the whole shift. Mayonnaise stops being the thing that undoes an otherwise good meal and becomes the thing that unlocks it.

The trade-off, stated plainly

Homemade mayonnaise keeps about a week in the fridge, not four months. That gap is exactly what the EDTA in the commercial jar is for. You are trading shelf life for control over what is in it, and you should know that going in.

One food safety note. This recipe uses a raw egg. If you are pregnant, immunocompromised, elderly, or making it for young children, use pasteurized eggs. They emulsify identically.

Since the oil is 80% of the finished jar, it is the only ingredient here worth being fussy about. House of Macadamias cold-presses its oil from single-origin South African macadamias with nothing added, and publishes the lab testing behind the fat profile. It is available here.

FAQ

Can you make mayonnaise with macadamia oil? Yes, and it is one of the best oils for it. Macadamia oil emulsifies like any neutral oil, and its mild buttery flavor suits mayonnaise far better than olive oil, which turns bitter when blended at high speed. Use one cup of macadamia oil to one whole room-temperature egg, plus lemon juice, mustard and salt.

Does macadamia oil mayonnaise taste like macadamia nuts? Barely. Macadamia oil is much subtler than people expect, closer to a soft buttery background than a nut flavor, and the mustard and lemon cover most of what remains. It tastes like mayonnaise.

What is the healthiest oil for homemade mayonnaise? Macadamia oil. It has the lowest omega-6 content of any common cooking oil at about 2%, against 51% in the soybean oil used in most commercial mayonnaise, and the highest good fat content at around 80%. Since mayonnaise is about 80% oil by weight, that choice decides almost the entire nutritional profile.

Is store-bought mayonnaise made with seed oils? Almost all of it. Hellmann's Real Mayonnaise, Duke's and Kraft all list soybean oil as the first ingredient. Even Hellmann's olive oil version contains canola and soybean oil, with water listed first.

Is avocado oil mayo actually better? On paper yes, at 10 to 13% omega-6 versus 51%. The complication is purity. UC Davis found 82% of commercial avocado oils tested were rancid or adulterated, some with soybean oil, and no enforceable standards exist for what avocado oil must contain.

Why did my homemade mayonnaise not thicken? Usually a cold egg, or moving the blender too soon. Bring the egg to room temperature, and hold the blender still at the bottom of a narrow jar for the first 10 to 15 seconds so the emulsion has a base to build on.

How long does homemade mayonnaise last? About one week refrigerated. Commercial mayonnaise lasts months because of preservatives like calcium disodium EDTA, which this recipe does not contain.

Fat-free dressing is the health food that stops you absorbing your vegetables. Mayonnaise made with the right oil does the opposite, and it takes two minutes to make.

Sources