Starting with the Mustard

Hello blog world!

I have for many years now followed several cooking blogs, especially the vegetarian ones. The reason being, I absolutely love to cook. I use cooking as my stress relief. Between my own curiosity and having picky eaters surrounding me, I am often trying to find new and interesting things to cook. Frequently I make up my own recipe.

Yesterday my fiance's mother and I attempted to make mustard. To say the least, it was not what I expected. It was very sweet and tasted as if it might go with something Asian, but I was really wanting a good deep, rich mustard, the kind that, if you get too large of a bite, makes your eyes tear up a bit.

After a couple of hours of researching the internet on mustard creating techniques and the history of mustard I finally settled on the perfect mustard recipe. I discovered there are three basic types of mustard seeds: yellow, brown and black. The darker the mustard, the hotter the mustard. So after a quick trip down to my local bulk food store I returned with a couple cups of brown mustard seed. After tasting a couple of raw and digging in my cupboard for some mustard powder I was ready to start.

Part of thing with mustard is deciding how "hot" you want it. The first step towards your heat selection is what mustard seeds you choose. As I stated earlier, the lighter the color the milder the mustard. The second part is the temperature of the liquid that you use. When you mix the mustard seeds with the water you start a chemical reaction that creates the heat. The colder the liquid you use the hotter the mustard will be.

This is the rough recipe that I settled on. I tend to be a dump cook, but I worked hard to give exact amounts. I use a lot of mustard so I made a large recipe. I will be personally using water but if you are wanting more of a French or Roman mustard you should use wine. The nice thing is, not only is this recipe easy to scale, it is easy to customize too your hearts content.

Basic Hot Mustard Recipe

    1/4 cup brown mustard seeds
    3 tablespoons ground yellow mustard
    2 tablespoons salt
    3 tablespoons white vinegar
    1/2 cup water or wine
    Any herbs you may desire.

1. First you need to grind the mustard seeds. I did not have a food mill so I threw them into my blender. How well ground you want them is up to you. Some of the fancier mustards are just barely cracked while others are smooth. I choose the middle ground so I lightly ground the seeds

2. Put the mustard seeds into a bowl with the ground mustard, salt and whatever herbs you desire. I personally used 2 tablespoons of garlic powder in mine.

3. Add the vinegar and the wine or water to the mixture. I used ice water for an extra spicy mustard. At this point put in an air tight container and refrigerate for 12 hours before use. The mustard will have a bitter taste at first but that goes away with refrigeration.