Mustard

Mustard

We started harvesting our mustard seed last year and making prepared mustard by grinding the seeds with vinegar and a bit of salt and sugar. I found an article that advised leaving it at room temperature until it reached the desired mildness, then refrigerating it. The article also warned that it would taste like toxic waste on the first day, which is true, but don't give up! -- after only a few days it tastes great.

Like many members of the Brassica family, mustard is ridiculously easy to grow. After it produces a very pretty set of small yellow flowers, the seeds form in a tiny pod that's like a miniature black-eyed pea pod, only about an inch long. I laboriously zipped open the fresh pods until it finally dawned on me that once they were thoroughly dry they could be crumbled open; the chaff is then easily blown away, leaving the tiny seeds.

I don't recommend a mortar and pestle for the blending process. My ordinary blender did a good job, though it took the better part of twenty minutes to convert a cup or so of seeds to a blender-full of prepared mustard. You just keep adding vinegar until the mixture blends properly, and add bits of salt and sugar to taste. This makes an absolutely killer mustard for spreading on the outside of a ham in cooking, along with brown sugar and crumbled ginger cookies, à la Alton Brown.

Last year's crop was brown mustard, the medium kind. Mild American mustards are made with white seed. Crazy-hot Indian food is made with black mustard, which is the kind of seeds that just came in the mail, and which will go into one of our newly prepared beds this weekend, mustard being a cool-weather crop.