The Special Ingredient For The Best Garlic Bread Around Is Mayo

If you are sprucing some of your recipes in advance of the festive season or before hosting a big gathering or party, one perennial classic that goes well with many diverse dishes any time of the year is delicious and easy cheesy garlic bread. 

Soft, warm, and full of flavor, it's hard to go wrong with a serving of garlic bread as an accompaniment to pastas, salads, and meat-centric meals. But there's a way to elevate garlic bread even further. Just add one special ingredient to it — homemade mayonnaise.

That's right, a dollop of mayo added to your garlic and butter spread is all you need to make the side dish even more gooey and tasty than it regularly is, and it's all because of the additional creaminess. If pairing mayo with garlic bread sounds unusual, this trick has actually been very popular in Brazil for a long time, and there's good reason why.

Mayonnaise is a very simple and creamy condiment made by combining eggs, olive oil, lemon juice, mustard, and salt and pepper to taste. Its texture is light and creamy, with a whipped frothiness, and its flavor is quite distinctive. Some would say its distinctive flavor is the reason that mayo should not be used to make garlic bread. However, when combined with garlic and butter, mayo's flavor notes can barely be perceived and its other attributes come to the surface.

In fact, mayo makes the spread applied to your French bread even creamier, and the condiment's higher fat content helps toast the bread, too. A big perk of this additional ingredient is that the garlic bread will come out of the oven with golden brown and extra crispy crusts, even though the center remains soft, gooey, and delicious. Some people also add sugar and scallions to the garlic butter spread to add more layers of flavor in every bite.

Now that you know the reason behind the success of this nifty little food hack, you may be wondering how to recreate it yourself for optimal results. Most recipes call for 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise for every serving of garlic bread prepared for four people. 

You'll want to add the mayo to your garlic, butter, and cheese mixture until it blends in seamlessly with the other ingredients; just be mindful that mayo is not a replacement of butter or other ingredients in this recipe. It's an addition and not a substitution meant to enhance the flavor of the bread.

It's recommended to slice the loaf of bread in half along its length to start. Then, once you have separated the halves, spread the cheesy garlic mixture, with the mayo, on both sides before baking. It's also good to keep in mind that the thickness of the mixture applied to the bread should depend on how wide the loaf of bread is in order to cover the entire surface area.