Homemade grainy mustard

Every year my SO and I send out homemade holiday presents to our families. Our two most requested presents are our fruitcake and our mustard, and since we've made these recipes for nearly 10 years now, we figure it's time to share. I'll be posting the mustard today, followed followed by the fruitcake recipe in a few weeks (once we've had time to experiment some with the recipe).

Our mustard is made from whole yellow and brown mustard seeds that have been only partially crushed, and thus you get treated to little bursts of mustard flavor as you eat. The flavor is different from store-bought mustards: our mustard is sharper than most, doesn't taste as much of vinegar or turmeric, and has a hint of onions thanks to shallots. We have reports from family members that even though they've tried, they can't find anything like this in stores. Since we just got finished making our annual batch of mustard a few days ago¹, it's this week's end-of-the-week recipe blogging post.

Note that this recipe requires a few days to soak the mustard seeds before making, and tastes best if left to mellow for a week or two before eating, so plan accordingly.

1/2 cup dry yellow mustard seeds
1/2 cup dry brown mustard seeds
1 cup rice vinegar
1 shallot, finely chopped
1 tablespoon kosher salt

1. Put the brown and yellow mustard seeds into separate containers and add approximately 3/8 cup (1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons) of rice vinegar to each container. Cover each container tightly and let sit at room temperature for at least 2 days, stirring occasionally. If the mustard seeds end up looking dry during the soaking period, add a bit more vinegar to moisten.
2. Grind each type of mustard seed until many of the seeds have broken open (the seeds should start clumping together, and you'll start to see little bits of seeds in addition to whole seeds). For an artisanal feel, you can do this by hand with a mortar and pestle; it's a lot of hard work, and is guaranteed to make your grinding arm sore. For the lazy cook's mustard, put the seeds into a food processor and process with long pulses. It's best to grind the two types of seeds separately, as the yellow and brown mustard seeds grind at different rates.
3. Mix the mustard seeds, salt, shallot, and remaining vinegar (~1/4 cup) in a bowl. Add extra vinegar to bring the mustard to a nice paste-like consistency (it may take an extra tablespoon or so).
4. Transfer to jars and store in the fridge.

Notes:

Don't use aluminum cookware with this recipe, as it may react with the vinegar.

There's no need to use exactly 1/2 cup of each type of mustard seed; as long as you have a total of one cup of seeds you should be fine. The yellow seeds are milder than the brown seeds, so variations in proportions will change the sharpness of the final product.

We store the mustard in sealed jars in the fridge, though it may not require refrigeration (and we regularly ship it cross country without issue). The mustard keeps for a long time; we've kept jars in the fridge for more than a year and it still tastes great.

The recipe above makes a bit less than 2 cups of finished mustard. We typically make at least five times that amount (2 1/2 cups of each type of seed, ~2 cups of vinegar to soak each type of seed initially, 5 tablespoons kosher salt, 5 shallots, and 1 to 1 1/2 cups vinegar for mixing at the end), and as long as you're using a food processor for grinding you won't go crazy. In the past we've always hand-ground small batches of mustard; we only recently started using a food processor due to making large batches, and thus we're not sure how well a food processor will work with a small batch of mustard.

This recipe is based on one in Walden (1995), a book which wins the Radagast and SO award for best food photography.

Reference:

Walden, H. 1995. Sensational Preserves: 250 recipes for jams, jellies, chutneys, and sauces. Reader's Digest, NY.

¹ And yes, this means that if you're a family member waiting for your holiday mustard shipment, your mustard is indeed in the mail.

Radagast and SO's Summer Bounty Super-Hot Hot Sauce

My SO and I decided to diversify our pepper planting this summer by growing some Jamaican Hot Chocolate peppers, in addition to the jalapeños that we usually grow. Jamaican Hot Chocolates are very pretty (they ripen to a nice chocolate brown), but as they're a close relative of habaneros, they're extremely hot: they score about 100,000 to 200,000 scoville units, whereas jalapeños score around 2,000 to 10,000 scoville units. A friend of ours grew the same peppers, and reported that touching his eye after cutting one pepper in half resulted in hours of searing pain.

We, quite honestly, didn't know what to do with the peppers. So, they piled up on our counter; eventually we decided that we had to do something with them, and thus we created "Radagast and SO's Summer Bounty Super-Hot Hot Sauce." We took inspiration from a few hot sauce recipes we found online.

We've never used hot sauces regularly before, but we both love this hot sauce. While it's packed with heat (a tiny dab on a spoonful of rice is enough to make our mouths burn), it has a rich smoky flavor that goes well with many dishes, and it doesn't have the strong vinegar flavor that some hot sauces do. So far we've added it to tuna melts, mac and cheese, roasted asparagus, tomato soup, tomato pasta sauce, and had it on chips, and it's been great in everything (note: we're adding tiny amounts to each of these; often less than 1/8 of a teaspoon to a full serving). We can't wait to add it to a pot of chili.

Since we never thought we'd be adding hot sauce to our recipes, this is this week's end-of-the-week recipe blogging post.

CAUTION: See safety instructions before working with the peppers.

20 Jamaican Hot Chocolate peppers, seeded, deveined, and quartered (habaneros would probably be a fine substitution)
18 red jalapeños, seeded, deveined, and quartered
1 pound whole tomatoes, peeled and seeded
1 20-oz can crushed pineapple, in juice
~20 garlic cloves, minced or pressed with a garlic press
2 1/4 cups white vinegar
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup dry mustard powder
4 tablespoons paprika (we used a mix of smoked Spanish and regular)
3 tablespoons kosher salt
2 tablespoons ground black pepper
2 tablespoons cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground allspice

0. Get out all kitchen implements that you may require during cooking before handling any of the peppers. Prepare a vegetable oil rinse station (see below), have plates or other washable spoon rests ready near all work areas, put on your gloves and goggles, and have paper towels at the ready so you can hold non-washable items without getting capsaicin all over them.
1. Add all ingredients to a blender and blend until smooth. This may require multiple batches of blending. Ensure that the top of the blender is firmly attached (and any holes are sealed) to prevent sauce from being flung around the room.
2. Carefully transfer the blended ingredients to a pot that is large enough to have absolutely no risk of the sauce boiling over.
3. Bring the sauce to a simmer over medium-high heat, and simmer for 20 minutes on the lowest possible heat that will maintain the simmer. Be extremely careful not to bring the sauce to a full boil, as that will drastically increase the risk that sauce gets splattered all over you and your kitchen.
4. Carefully decant the sauce into prepared jars (see notes).
5. Thoroughly wash anything that you touched after handling the peppers before removing your gloves; we recommend running items through a dishwasher multiple times.
6. Remove your gloves and throughly wash your hands with vegetable oil, followed by soap and water.

Safety instructions:

The compound in peppers that causes the "heat" is capsaicin. Capsaicin is lipophilic, which means that it can diffuse straight through your skin and cause pain wherever you come into contact with it (hands, face, eyes, genitals, etc.). Capsaicin does not wash off completely with regular soap and water, and thus I would never recommend handing cut Jamaican Hot Chocolates or habaneros with anything but gloved hands (we used latex gloves). In addition, I'd strongly recommend wearing goggles, a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, and socks when making this hot sauce. It wouldn't be going overboard to consider a face-shield and a respirator; at the very least make sure your work area is extremely well ventilated, as even the fumes are strong.

Probably the best method to get capsaicin off of your skin is to scrub with pure vegetable oil. If you do accidentally get capsaicin on your skin (you'll know if you do), immediately wash the affected area with vegetable oil, followed by soap and water (note, however, that this will not remove all the capsaicin, and there will likely be nothing you can do to stop the pain).

Make absolutely sure that all utensils, pots, and other items you touch with capsaicin-tainted hands are washed thoroughly before handling them bare-handed. Even after wearing gloves to cook the entire dish, we wash our hands with vegetable oil first, followed by soap, and try to refrain from touching sensitive parts of our bodies for the rest of the day.

Notes:

Peppers can vary widely in the amount of capsaicin they contain. We would thus suggest that you assume that you're using the hottest peppers ever grown, and taste only the tiniest dab of your final hot sauce before trying it in larger quantities. We find that, with our peppers, a dab the size of half a rice grain is plenty to flavor an entire chip (though note that we're relative wimps when it comes to spice).

This recipe makes more than six cups of hot sauce. To store the sauce, we suggest canning it. While we'll leave it up to other sources to provide full canning protocols, what we do is boil clean jars, their lids, and any implements we'll need to handle the jars and put sauce into them (including tongs and a funnel) for 10 minutes in a covered pot, then turn off the heat and leave the pot covered until we're ready to use the jars. When we're ready to decant the sauce we remove the jars from the pot with tongs, ladle the piping-hot hot sauce into the jars and immediately seal them with lids. We let the jars cool at room temperature before labeling them and moving them to the fridge.

And, as a final note, we have no idea how important the various spices are to the final flavor. Given the small quantities of sauce required to flavor items, we're probably approaching homeopathic dilutions for some of the spices; thus, it's likely that at least some of the spices could probably be left out without affecting the flavor.

Basic cheese sauce

Some of my fondest childhood memories are eating my mom's steamed cauliflower slathered with cheese sauce after returning from trips¹. What follows is the Radagast and SO household standard cheese sauce recipe; while this isn't the fanciest cheese sauce, it's easy to make, reminds me of my mom's, and tastes, well, cheesy. Since we had cauliflower with cheese sauce last week, this is this week's end-of-the-week recipe blogging post.

1/4 cup (4 tablespoons) unsalted butter
1/4 cup (4 tablespoons) flour
2 cups milk
2 cups grated cheddar cheese (we use medium cheddar)
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

0. Heat the milk in the microwave (or in a small saucepan over medium heat), but do not bring it to a boil.
1. Melt the butter in a non-stick saucepan over medium-high heat.
2. Add the flour, and, stirring constantly, cook until the flour browns slightly (probably around 3 minutes).
3. Remove the pan from the heat and let cool, stirring frequently, until the flour mixture stops bubbling.
4. Add the warmed milk to the flour mixture, return to the heat, and whisk constantly until smooth.
5. Cook, whisking frequently, until the sauce is somewhat thickened (probably about 5 minutes).
6. Add the cheese (adding it in two batches helps keep it from forming a giant, slow-to-dissolve blob) and stir until all the cheese is melted.
7. Add the black pepper and salt; taste, and adjust the seasonings to your liking.

Notes:

If you like nutmeg (which Radagast doesn't), a pinch or two might compliment the sauce's flavor.

This sauce should be served warm, as it thickens when it cools. A skin may form on the surface of the sauce if it sits for a while at room temperature; just stir this skin back into the sauce and it will be fine. If the mixture begins to thicken too much before you're ready to eat it, simply re-heat it on the stove (or in the microwave) briefly, stirring frequently.

¹ I still love cheese sauce on cauliflower, though these days I typically use roasted cauliflower as the base, not steamed.

Curry yogurt mayonnaise

My SO greatly enjoys artichokes, and has been trying to find a complement to them that will make me greatly enjoy them as well. Homemade garlic mayonnaise was a good start, but this past week we made curry yogurt mayonnaise, and now that I've had some I may well start thinking of artichokes more often.

You'd hardly know this was mayonnaise from the look or taste of it; it's colored like mustard, has a bit of a yogurty tang to it, and is filled with a strong flavor of curry spices. We've enjoyed this on both baked potatoes and artichokes, and Joy of Cooking reports that it goes well with virtually anything (vegetables, meats, etc.). Since we plan to make more of this in the future, it's this week's end-of-the-week recipe blogging post.

3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 tablespoons curry powder
1 egg yolk
2 tablespoons beaten egg
1/4 teaspoon mustard powder
3 teaspoons fresh lime juice (lemon juice would also work)
1/4 teaspoon salt (plus extra, to taste)
Pinch ground black pepper
3/4 cup plain yogurt (we used whole-milk)

We make this mayonnaise in a food processor with the metal cutting blade; it can also be made in a blender or by hand, but the processing times will be different.

1. Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a pan over low heat until hot, add the curry powder, stir continuously until the curry powder is fragrant (about 30 seconds), and then remove from the heat and let cool.
2. Process the egg yolk, beaten egg, and mustard powder together in a food processor for about 30 seconds.
3. Add 1 teaspoon of the lime juice and 1/4 teaspoon of salt, and then process for 7-8 seconds.
4. With the food processor running continuously, slowly pour in the oil. You're trying to make an emulsion here, so the slower you pour the better (within reason, of course).
5. Scrape down the sides of the bowl and add the remainder of the lime juice, pepper, and enough salt to make the mayonnaise tasty. Process to mix.
6. Add the yogurt and process to mix.
7. Add the cooled curry powder and oil mixture, and process to mix.
8. Check the salt and lime levels, and serve.

Notes:

The amount of salt, pepper, and lime juice are very flexible; add however much (or little) you desire. Joy of Cooking reports that you can add more oil (during the emulsion step) if you want a thicker mayonnaise.

If all you want is standard homemade mayonnaise, just follow steps 2-5 (omitting, of course, the curry powder and yogurt). We enjoy making basic mayonnaise with straight extra virgin olive oil, but wouldn't suggest using extra virgin olive oil for this mayonnaise because the spices would mask the oil's flavor.

We used Penzey's Spices Sweet Curry Powder for this; any good curry powder should work.

This recipe is based on one from Rombauer et al. (1997); we switched from lemon juice to lime juice.

Rombauer, I. S., M. R. Becker, and E. Becker. 1997. Joy of Cooking. Scribner, NY.