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What ingredients (all) are shared between butter and mayonaise?

Ninjakreborn
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    Butter only has one ingredient: Butter. Mayonnaise does not contain butter and so there is no intersection in their ingredient sets. Do you mean what molecules do they have in common? That doesn't seem particularly useful to me. – Sobachatina Sep 04 '14 at 04:02
  • This is tagged as an allergy question. Are you asking whether mayonnaise is suitable for you if you have a dairy allergy, or vice versa? – logophobe Sep 04 '14 at 04:45
  • Mayonnaise doesn't have much composition in common with butter, but would seem to join (now disfavored) hydrogenated-oil margarine in having vegetable oil as a major component. – Chris Stratton Oct 11 '14 at 18:19
  • Also, `clarified butter` is almost pure milkfat, with a relative minimum of the other milk components which most often cause bad reactions (though a given sample might not be entirely free of them). – Chris Stratton Oct 11 '14 at 18:26

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Normally, there are no ingredients shared between butter and mayonnaise. The only ingredient in butter is milk, either fresh or cultured. The ingredients of mayonnaise are egg yolks, vegetable oil, mustard, water and acid. As you can see, there is nothing in common between the two.

There are two exceptions when they may share something.

First, you can get salted butter, and many mayonnaise recipes also incorporate some salt. Then the salt is the shared ingredient.

Second, fats are interchangeable in the making of emulsified sauces, and home cooks will frequently call their sauce "mayonnaise" when made with butter instead of oil. Technically, this makes it a hollandaise derivative and not a mayonnaise, but many people won't know the difference. If you happen to eat "mayonnaise" made with butter, then the shared ingredient is the butter itself. With commercially bought mayonnaise, you can be practically sure that there is no butter in it.

rumtscho
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  • I would say that butter is an ingredient of milk not the other way around. Butter is entirely a subset of milk. – Sobachatina Sep 04 '14 at 19:18
  • @Sobachatina in cooking, I have always seen the meaning of "ingredient" as "what you need to start with to get the final product", which only accidentally also means "what is contained in the final product" most of the time, but not always. For butter, you start with milk, not the other way round. – rumtscho Sep 04 '14 at 22:11