Picture the scene.

You crack open the fridge, fumble past the leftovers and (hurrah!) locate that jar of mustard that you could have sworn was half-full. Only those deceptive splodges clinging to the sides of the jar are little more than a masquerade of thin smears and (boo!) the jar is, in fact, devoid of any appreciable content.

Where once there was mustard, now there is only disappointment.

Curses! Empty jar syndrome strikes again...

It’s made worse by the fact that, in my case, I have only myself to blame. I really shouldn’t leave as-good-as-empty jars in the fridge, for they do not a good recipe nor a happy camper make. The only consolation is that I am in possession of several not-so-empty jars of mustard seeds. Homemade mustard it is, then.

Mustard stocks restored, relief all 'round

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Homemade Beer Mustard

It’s episodes like this that serve as a reminder that it is, in fact, very easy to make your own mustard – once you have mustard seeds and/or dry mustard powder to hand, that is. There’s a useful general guide to doing so over here.

In my case, I decided that I really rather fancied some spicy beer mustard. I found several recipes having similar beer/vinegar/onion/garlic formulae – so I took this one, tweaked it, and this is the result. It’s a reasonably hot mustard, which, while it sat aging on the counter, smelled rather like a good barbecue sauce. I’ve been mixing it with a little mayonnaise and smearing it across cheddar cheese and crackers. I highly recommend you do the same.

You’ll need:

• 4 tblsp yellow mustard seeds
• 1 tblsp brown or black mustard seeds
• 125ml red or dark ale (I used Smithwick’s)
• 75ml cider vinegar
• 1 small onion (about 100g), finely chopped
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 1 tblsp honey
• 1 tblsp dark muscovado sugar (or other dark brown sugar)
• 0.25 tsp turmeric
• 0.5 tsp allspice
• 0.5 tsp fine salt

You’ll also need:

• A spice or coffee grinder to grind the mustard seeds and a blender or food processor to blend the mustard fixin’s, plus a jar or jars with non-corrosive lids, sufficient to store about 250g mustard.

The Steps:

• Grind half of the yellow mustard seeds to a fine powder. Mix the powder together with the remaining whole yellow mustard seeds and the brown or black mustard seeds in a non-metallic bowl and set aside.
• In a small, non-reactive saucepan, mix together the beer, cider vinegar, onion, garlic, honey, sugar, turmeric, allspice and salt. Bring to a boil, then simmer gently, uncovered, for about 10-15 minutes, until it reduces by about half.
• Remove from the heat and pour the beer/vinegar mixture over the ground and whole mustard seeds. Leave to stand, covered but unrefrigerated, for about 48 hours. Do have a sniff occasionally during this period – ’tis lovely.
• When ready for the last step, prepare your jars. Turn your oven on to 140C. Wash the jars in hot soapy water, rinse thoroughly, and sterilise, either by boiling in water for 10 minutes and then drying in the oven or just by keeping the jars in the oven for at least 30 minutes before using. Allow the jars to cool before filling.
• Grind the mustard mixture in a food processor for 3-4 minutes, until the mixture is creamy but the seeds remain coarse and grainy. If the mixture is too thick, add a little more beer or vinegar.
• Bottle the mustard, seal tightly with lids that have been dipped in boiling water, and, ideally, allow it to age for another 2-3 days in the fridge before using. It should keep for several months but it will lose flavour over time, especially once opened, so it’s best to keep it refrigerated.

The Variations:

• You can vary the proportion of yellow and brown or black mustard seeds in the recipe according to your tastes – yellow seeds are mild, brown seeds are hot and aromatic, black seeds are strong and pungent.

The Results:

• 250g of hot mustardy stuff

]]> http://www.thedailyspud.com/2011/01/27/mustard-recipe-beer-homemade/feed/ 20 http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/22/ketchup-recipe-rhubarb/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ketchup-recipe-rhubarb http://www.thedailyspud.com/2010/07/22/ketchup-recipe-rhubarb/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:01:29 +0000 Daily Spud http://www.thedailyspud.com/?p=20767

Exotic: (adjective)

1. From another part of the world; foreign;
2. Intriguingly unusual or different; excitingly strange;

There will, no doubt, be much that fits those descriptions at this weekend’s Festival of World Cultures in Dun Laoghaire. A gloriously bubbling stew of music, dance, crafts and food from the far flung reaches of the globe. Even if food were your only interest – and who would I be to judge you for that – the festival’s International Food Traders would surely warrant a visit, as would the Global Village and the South Asian Mela Market.

All told, not a bad way to spend a few days. However, as luck and my projected geographical location for the weekend would have it, I will miss the entire thing. Clearly I will have to compensate by cooking something with a suitably international pedigree. Like ketchup. And if you suppose that such a ubiquitous sauce is too familiar to be exotic, you might have to revise your thinking when you meet the variety made from rhubarb.

Rhubarb ketchup - yes, such a thing exists

See, the first thing you need to know is that, while tomato ketchup might hold a rather dominant position in the global condiment market, it isn’t even the original of the ketchup species.

What were called catsups originated in China and were discovered there by East India merchants sometime in the 17th century, who then introduced them to other parts of Asia and thence to Britain and beyond. Most early catsups were based on mushrooms and it was only when the tomato become more popular in the 19th century that tomato catsup start to emerge.

The chief virtue of early catsups was that they kept for a very long time and were thus popular on long sea voyages. In her book Curry, Lizzie Collingham reports on a recipe that Hannah Glasse provided in the 1748 edition of The Art of Cookery. The recipe, addressed to the “Captains of Ships”, called for stale beer, anchovies, mace, cloves, pepper, ginger and mushrooms in order to make a “Catchup to keep Twenty Years”.

Now, while I do expect this rhubarb ketchup to mature nicely over time, I can’t really guarantee that it will keep for 20 years. I, for one, could not restrain myself from eating such a tangy, fruity concoction for anything like that long.

Sometimes, I wish Mother Nature would do labels.

A little sign, saying “makes great pesto” and pointing towards that untended clump of leaves at the bottom of the garden would have been really helpful. Instead, for years, I had supposed that this plant’s only part of edible interest was the flowers. Oops.

Thanks to a little research, I now know better.

Wild garlic - not just about the flowers, you know

The narrow leaves of the plant in question – Allium triquetrum, one of a number of plants referred to as wild garlic – do indeed make the most fabulous pesto. More than that, it is a pesto that is made for use with potatoes. I would quite happily eat gobs of this with roast spuds, oven baked chips or fried potato cakes, mix it with mashed potato, stir it through a plate of gnocchi, swirl it into a bowl of potato soup, dollop it onto a baked spud, or serve alongside some steamed new potatoes.

Hello, my young spuds

And new potatoes is what I hope to have, oh, sometime next month, if my bagged up potato seedlings continue to make steady progress. I just hope I have some wild garlic left by then – I’d love for them to meet.

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Wild Garlic Pesto (for spuds and other things)

I made this pesto with narrow-leafed wild garlic or Allium triquetrum (also known as three cornered leek or three cornered garlic). You can, however, also use the wider leaves of that other wild garlic found here, Allium ursinum (also known as ramsons) or in North America, try Allium tricoccum (aka ramps).

Personally, I don’t care for pesto that’s too oily, so I’ve only added a small amount here, though you can add more if that’s to your taste. Like any pesto, this is best freshly made, though you can keep it in the fridge covered with a film of olive oil or freeze the freshly made pesto in small containers. If you do want to freeze the pesto, I see that Darina Allen, in Forgotten Skills of Cooking, suggests that it is best to freeze it minus the parmesan, which can be added later, when the pesto has been defrosted.

You’ll need:

• 40g pine nuts
• 75g wild garlic leaves
• 3-4 tblsp extra virgin olive oil
• 50g parmesan, finely grated
• salt to taste

You’ll also need:

• A food processor or mortar and pestle.

The Steps:

• Toast the pine nuts in a dry frying pan over a medium heat, stirring frequently, until they are browned but not burned, about 4-5 minutes.
• Using a food processor, blend together the pine nuts, wild garlic leaves and olive oil. If you don’t have a food processor, chop the pine nuts and garlic leaves first, then mash together using a mortar and pestle.
• Stir in the grated parmesan. Taste for salt and add some if it needs it (which it may not, depending on the saltiness of the cheese).
• Enjoy with any number of potato dishes or, yes, even with pasta.

The Variations:

• You can bump up the garlic flavour by adding a clove of garlic to the blend or make any number of other pesto sauces by using different greens. Basil leaves are, of course, the classic, but rocket also makes for an excellent pesto.

The Results:

• Around 200g of pesto, of which I will easily eat half in a single sitting.

Thanksgiving, I mean. It’s an event that generally passes us by on this side of the Atlantic but, having enjoyed several Thanksgiving dinners in the company of American friends and family, I’ve become quite partial to the event.

Finding no guidance on the matter of who to ask, I thought it best to go straight to the top.

Dear Mr. President,

I would like to borrow, if I may, your Thanksgiving holiday. Given that it has its roots in celebrating harvest bounty and involves eating lots of nice food, it seems like rather a good one to me.

May I remind you that you seem to have Paddy’s Day out on permanent loan, it seems only fair to claw one back.

Yours,
D.S.

P.S. Hope you like the cranberry sauce

Giving thanks with cranberries

no matter what some people will tell you – salt in indispensable to good food and good cooking

Jeffrey Steingarten in his essay ‘Salt’, taken from The Man Who Ate Everything

To salt or not to salt, that is the question

I never met a potato that didn’t respond warmly to the addition of a bit of salt. I suspect that there are few, if any, who would disagree. Salt is an essential addition to spuds, as well as to many other foods. However, there are those who would contend that you can have too much of this particular good thing.

The other day I received two separate communications about campaigns afoot both here and in the UK which aim to “raise awareness … that our diets are still too high in salt and that the majority of dietary salt is from processed foods such as processed meats, sauces and bread”. They have introduced salt calculator applications to help the consumer to identify high-salt products, and also provide advice on reducing our consumption of salt in the home. The impetus for such a reduction, of course, is the apparent correlation between high-salt diets and high blood pressure, which leads to an increased risk of, among other things, stroke and heart disease.

That much of our salt intake comes in the form of highly processed foods is true, and that these campaigns should encourage us to eat less of these foods is no bad thing. If it’s a case of arguing for more boiled spuds and less instant mash, then I am absolutely on the side of home-cooked taters.

However, I am less convinced about the need to make drastic reductions in the use of salt when it comes to home-cooked foods. That there is a correlation between high salt intake and high blood pressure would appear to be the subject of much debate. A 1998 article in Science magazine entitled “The (Political) Science of Salt” discussed in detail the state of the research on both sides at that time and observed that:

While the [U.S.] government has been denouncing salt as a health hazard for decades, no amount of scientific effort has been able to dispense with the suspicions that it is not.

That there was even any debate on the matter was something that I came upon by reading Jeffrey Steingarten’s essay ‘Salt’ and, more recently, through Nina Planck’s excellent book Real Food: What To Eat And Why. Both note that 20% or so of the population is salt-sensitive, meaning that blood pressure goes up when they eat salt and down when they don’t, but the rest of us are not. Meanwhile, there are other factors which appear to be more clearly linked to high blood pressure, such as lack of potassium, stress, smoking, lack of exercise and obesity.

I appreciate that the salt-reduction campaigns are well intentioned and if they succeed in moving people away from processed foods and towards home cooking, then that is to be applauded. However, their suggestions for salt avoidance in the home are not going to do anyone’s home cooking any favours. One campaign suggests using freshly ground pepper instead of salt. I would respectfully argue that these two are not the same thing and that your dishes will simply end up tasting peppery and under-salted. Another suggestion advocates choosing foods which have been flavoured with herbs and spices “so you shouldn’t need to add any salt”. Of course herbs and spices will impart flavour but, more often than not, they will need at least some salt to marry those flavours together.

The fact is that I feel distinctly uncomfortable where such campaigns portray salt as the ultimate villain of the piece, rather than the highly processed foods, from which most of our dietary salt emanates and which probably contain other ingredients that aren’t exactly poster children for a healthy diet. Just because a food label indicates that a food is low in sodium does not automatically mean that it is good for you. As far as I am aware, the campaigns do not attempt, for example, to direct us towards using unrefined salts, which, as Nina Planck points out, will contain many other vital trace elements and, as it happens, generally taste better too.

Now, anybody for some spuds cooked on a bed of salt?

I don’t know why that should be – I mean, tomatoes and potatoes are family. Be that as it may, the tomato branch of the clan comes in for the poor relation treatment in my garden. I never pinch out the tomatoey side shoots as they develop, even though I know I should. As a result, my tomato plants invariably end up an unruly mess, largely neglected and, because I grow them out of doors in an Irish summer, the harvest is, at best, decidedly green in colour.

Spud's green tomatoes

Still, I redeem my poor farming ways by making the likes of green tomato chutney and mustard pickle with green tomatoes. And, who knows, with any luck, some of the harvest will eventually turn its proper colour after a few weeks indoors. The tomatoes won’t be anything like as sweet as those fully ripened on the vine, but they will still be better than what often passes for tomatoes in Irish supermarkets. As anybody who lives here knows, the tomatoes offered for sale in this country are very often a pale imitation of the real thing, which makes growing your own a particularly satisfying endeavour, even if, like me, you’re not exactly top of the tomato-farming class.

When is a berry not a berry?

The answer, of course, is “More often than you might think”, and I would love to be able to say that, when asked, I rattled off the details of this answer to the amazement of all present. Instead, I could only dredge up a dim memory from school biology that there was, indeed, a bit more to the definition of berry than small edible fruit, but I’m afraid no amount of gin & tonic could help me get further than that. Rather, it took a quick chat with my friend the internet before my memory was, er, suitably refreshed.

The fact of the matter is that most of the things that we refer to as berries – strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, cranberries – are not berries in the botanical sense, whereas some distinctly unberrylike fruits, technically, are (and, yes, banana, I’m looking at you). The crux of the matter is that, botanically speaking, a berry is a simple fruit produced from a single plant ovary. Once other parts of the flower or plant start getting involved in the fruit, you are dealing with a berry no more.

So there you go. I apologise if I have shattered all of your berry-based illusions. You can take some comfort from the fact that gooseberries, at least, are fully paid-up members of the berry clan. Plus it’s doubtful that the plant police are going to swoop down on anyone for persisting with the idea that a blueberry is, y’know, a berry in the commonly understood sense of the word. If they were, I’d have to figure out how to properly refer to both the blueberries I got from my Ma’s local supplier the other day and to the sauce that resulted. Somehow, “the fruit formerly known as blueberry (and sauce thereof)” just doesn’t quite cut it.

Have blueberries, will make sauce

It’s not that I want to take sides or anything, but my onions are putting in the kind of show that would make a parent proud, while those low-yield spuds seem to be hanging out with the slackers at the back of the class. Those spuds will be made to stay late and work extra hard, I can assure you, but that’s a post for another day. Today, it’s all about the red winter onions, which have been doing their slow, steady growing thing for about 9 months now and are finally at the kitchen-ready stage.

While the onions were gestating, the fate of at least some of their number was sealed when I discovered Laragh Stuart’s sweet onion relish. It was one of the many tasty things that I picked up at the food market in Bloom last month. I devoured the little container of same in fairly short order, taking only as much time are it required to (a) spoon the relish onto crackers along with some Bluebell Falls goat’s cheese and (b) shove the entire crackery package into my mouth.

The ingredients list on the container of relish was pretty short – red onions, vinegar, sugar, salt and caraway – so I knew that the first task for my own red onions upon graduating from the garden would be a round of post-graduate relish work. And the report-card comments? Based on the research so far, this is what we got:

Homemade onion relish: May not be exactly the Laragh Stuart version, but very nice on goat's cheese all the same

And now for something completely different (or at least something that is unconnected in any way to onions or the relishing thereof). For any of you loitering about the Kinsale area this weekend, you may be interested to know that I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion on blogging this coming Saturday, the 18th, as part of the Kinsale Arts Week. Rumour has it that I know something about the subject. Fact is I’m going to be watching my Ps & Qs (and probably some other letters as well) around the Sweary Lady, who’s also participating, as are Claire Mulvany and Fiona McCann. Come along and make of us what you will!

]]> http://www.thedailyspud.com/2009/07/15/onion-relish-sweet/feed/ 20 http://www.thedailyspud.com/2009/04/09/my-kind-of-kimchi/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=my-kind-of-kimchi http://www.thedailyspud.com/2009/04/09/my-kind-of-kimchi/#comments Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:22:58 +0000 Daily Spud http://www.thedailyspud.com/?p=4391 Dearie me. I was once more beset by cabbages.

Multiple heads of the green stuff were inhabiting my kitchen and wearing a look that said if I didn’t do something soon, their mate turnip would show up and then there’d be real trouble. This time, however, I would take charge of the situation. Nothing like a bit of fermentation to show those brassicas just who was boss. Yes indeed, the time had come to make kimchi.

Kimchi a la Spud

Now, kimchi is really an umbrella term for the Korean approach to preserving raw vegetables. They’re seasoned in various ways, fermented and then (as I had seen at first hand on a visit to Seoul) eaten with just about everything. Lots of vegetables get the kimchi treatment but cabbage is probably the vegetable most commonly associated with it.

Traditional kimchi preparation, National Folk Museum, Seoul

Traditionally, vegetables for kimchi were packed into large earthenware pots and then buried in the ground while they fermented over the winter months. I had no plans to bury anything as part of the war on cabbages and, luckily, there would be no need to go to that extreme. While foraging around the internet, I found that David Lebovitz, he of all things chocolate and ice-creamy, had dabbled here and there with making kimchi. Using his later version as a guide, I launched my cabbage offensive and a mighty successful campaign it was too.

What I produced may not have been authentically Korean – I didn’t have the Korean chili pastes and powders, so I used harissa instead – but, with its nice chili/gingery bite, I have had no problem eating devouring vast quantities of this with all manner of things. With eggs, with rice, with noodles, with itself. Not with potatoes, though. Well, not yet. It’s only a matter of time, however, because when next I am beset by cabbages, I will be making this again.

I found myself eating a piece of thick white bread, toasted, spread with pesto and a few slices of tomato and then topped with bread sauce. It was one of those quick-fix-what-do-I-have-in-my-fridge kind of things. Don’t get me wrong, it was tasty, just unusual. You could almost class it as a sandwich of sorts, given that it did essentially involve two slices of bread on either side of the pesto-tomato filling, it’s just that one of the bread halves was appearing in sauce form and bringing with it that creamy, oniony Christmas dinner taste.

For those of you not familiar with bread sauce, let me tell you that Christmas dinner (to me at least) is not Christmas dinner without it. Traditional bread sauce – milk-based, thickened with breadcrumbs and usually flavoured with onion and cloves – is actually a centuries-old British creation. It’s a classic accompaniment to festive roast poultry on this side of the Atlantic, but clearly I’d try it with just about anything (witness above).