I am not one of them. When we visited the Netherlands when I had just turned fifteen, there was a moment of simultaneous enlightenment and gloat. My ketchup-loving family had to pay for little packets of the sweet, red dip, whereas mayonnaise flowed from the taps like the fountain of youth, pooling in the creases of wax paper sandwich wrappers for dipping french fries. “Ha!” I exclaimed, finally smug. “I told you I’m not weird for liking mayonnaise, or coating my fries in it. This stuff’s has been around for ages, and you are the weirdos. And the grossies. The weird gross weirdo-grossies”. (I was fifteen, so I didn’t say “shit” to my family [yet], but there was most definitely some puerile name-calling. I said all that to say this: I freaking love mayonnaise, and ranch dressing, and honey mustard (“honey” mustard, these days), and chipotle aioli, and all things creamy and tangy and right in the world. I deeply resent that at [non-vegan] restaurants I must default to overly-vinegared dressings I attempt to order a vegan salad and that I’m stuck with barbecue sauce for my dipping practice. But I also dislike paying $23.99 for a bottle of Veganaise. OK, so that might be a slight exaggeration, but this tofu mayo is really a godsend. It’s creamy and tangy to your own tastes, but it’s oil-free, making that chipotle aioli or vegan ranch dressing totally guilt-free. Because it’s lacking heaps of canola oil, it doesn’t taste quite like the jiggly jarred stuff, but it works beautifully in recipes or as a dip. This isn’t even much of a recipe! It’s more like, “here’s a thing and there’s a thing, put them together et voilà” but it’s so worth having in your back pocket. I used it to make a sriracha mayo dip for some tofu “chicken” nuggets (recipe coming soon!) and as a base for a mind-blowing lemon-garlic sauce for our, yes, kale-seitan earth bowls, loaded with sautéed zucchini and hummus. I originally made the recipe many, many (, MANY) moons ago, stirred in a bit of garlic powder to an ungarlicked batch, and used it as a dip for some baked sweet potato fries. Make this. It’s so yum, and such a great beginning to any number of creamy vegan dishes.
