About mustard, the condiment, I know nothing. I follow recipes.
I’ve now tried making two batches of mustard, from seed I harvested a little earlier this year. You can look at recent prior posts to see how I went about harvesting, threshing, and winnowing the mustard seeds.
This is the sum total of what I’ve learned. The same batch of mustard seeds can yield mustard (the condiment) that is pleasant and tame, or blisteringly hot, based on whether you cook the mustard, or not.
If you want your mustard (the condiment) to keep for a few months, you should make it with mustard and vinegar. You can make mustard with (e.g.) plain water, but I think that has to be (or perhaps should be) eaten within a few days of preparation.
So, vinegar mustard is the goal. Edible vinegar mustard.
Let me call the my two batches cooked vinegar mustard and uncooked vinegar mustard.
Cooked vinegar mustard calls for grinding the dry mustard seeds, adding vinegar and water, adding selected other ingredients (e.g., turmeric, salt, thickening agent), then cooking (simmering).
Uncooked vinegar mustard calls for soaking the seeds in vinegar overnight, adding salt, then grinding the soaked mustard seeds into a slurry. No cooking.
Since both were billed as recipes for mustard, the condiment, I expected them to taste … similar, I guess. At least like foods that are in the same family.
Not so.
The cooked mustard looks and tastes like ordinary yellow (e.g.. French’s) mustard. That’s what I was aiming for, and except for the coarseness of the texture, that’s what I got. That, and a bitter aftertaste which experts say should fade in a few days.
The uncooked vinegar mustard smells and tastes exactly like horseradish. A hot horseradish, at that. A quarter-teaspoon clears the sinuses. It’s far too hot for me to want to eat it. The day after I made it, it was still spit-it-out hot. Presumably this will mellow over time.
If I hadn’t made them both, I would not guess that the second condiment was mustard. Let alone guess that both mustards were made from the same batch of mustard seeds.
Conclusion: A lot of the “how to make mustard” articles I read were either over my head, or failed to speak plainly. You can find examples of mustard experts diving into the subtleties of this-or-that, but expected the newby to know that uncooked mustard will strip paint.
Or if they did, I guess I wasn’t listening. Spicy? Sure, the raw mustard recipe was billed as yielding a spicy mustard. But, spicy, like snorting a teaspoon of horseradish? Never saw that as a description of the final product.
Secondarily, I thought that “spicy mustard” or hot mustard or horseradish mustard was made with a spicier variety of mustard (black or brown, instead of yellow), or with added hot spices. I never imagined that the same seed that produces French’s can also produce something that’s searingly hot.
So that’s my value added here. If you make mustard from seed, keep in mind that uncooked vinegar mustard can do a pretty good imitation of the hottest horseradish you’ve ever eaten. At least at first. Taste-test with caution.
Addendum: These pictures were generated by free text-to-picture AI sites. This is the three best I got, in ten minutes’ search for something along the lines of flaming mouth, spicy food, flaming jar of mustard, and so on.
