more ramps - pizzas
It probably goes without saying that during ramp season we use them in a lot of our cooking. Basically anywhere we might normally use onions, leeks or shallots as ingredients, and then in a few things that feature ramps specifically.
Many of the ramps we harvested this week boasted really beautiful, large bulbs, some as large as my thumb.
Had some of the crew over last night to welcome our friend Pat back from his short vacation. We made pizzas, had some wine and beer, and hung out around the fire for a while. The pizzas all featured ramps that I harvested the day before.
I made three different pizzas, but each was highlighted with diced ramp bulbs and leaves. In the image above, from left to right, we have almost-ready for the oven: 1) tomatoes, ramps and cheddar cheese, 2) roasted red peppers, pickled artichokes, kalamata olives, ramps, 3) sliced baby red potatoes, mushrooms, ramps (I added mozzarella cheese to the final two pizzas after taking the picture).
Ducks get a little more yard area
This morning I put up a make-shift swimming pool and plastic netting enclosure for the ducks to use, just outside of their coop. They make such a wicked sloppy mess of their bedding in the area around their water bucket that I figured it might be better to have the watering area outside of the coop, at least during the warmer months. Next week I'll put together something more solid and attractive, but today I was in the mood and just used what materials we had on hand, including emptying out a big red tote that usually holds all of our Christmas decorations but now subs as a swimming pool.
We hope to put a fence all the way around the yard this summer so that the ducks can roam freely and safely in the yard and garden during the day. I still have some work to do on the coop, like finishing the roof off with some greenery, and I hope to finish that up this week as well.
We clipped their wings before setting them loose in the swimming area, although Kim's duck, Daphne, is so fat that I doubt she could fly without some assistance from a jet-pack.
We're getting two eggs a day from them now, which is pretty cool and has me thinking that a couple more layers might be worthwhile.
Pretty pickled ramps for tonight's Foodie Potluck
I seem to be saying this a lot lately but I am just flabbergasted that it has been nine full days since I las updated the blog. Seems like just three or four days ago. How can these days be going by so quickly?! I suppose it's because I've been generally going full bore from early morning until bed time lately, trying to get as many tasks accomplished in the yard and house before I start work at the new restaurant that will be opening soon in town (more to come on that).
Our Foodie Potluck gang is meeting tonight and this month's theme is Earth Day. A few folks expressed interest in the pickled ramps I posted last week so yesterday I pickled a bunch that I had harvested earlier in the day to bring to tonight's potluck.
Kim holding a couple nice bunches of cleaned and trimmed ramps about to be pickled.
Jeez, another pickled ramp recipe?
Ramps do appear to be this year's trendy food. There also seem to be a lot of pickled ramp recipes floating about lately. Allow me to add my own tried and true ramp pickling recipe to the mix. It's one that I really like to use with ramps especially, because I think the end product is a little unusual. The ramps look cool when you plate them and their flavor is a bit exotic.
One of the fun things about pickling is that it's such a simple process, but it also allows plenty of room to play with ingredients to create something all your own. I have a few different pickling recipes and two that I specifically use with ramps: one is a recipe I use for making ramps destined to be Bloody Mary or Martini garnishes, and the other is for ramps to be eaten as part of a meal. This is my recipe for the latter; I call it Curried Pickled Ramps.
Ingredients to make 1 pint of Curried Pickled Ramps:
- 1 cup white vinegar
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 2 tbl honey
- 2 tbl pickling spice *
- 1 tbl Kosher salt
- 1 tsp turmeric
- 1 heaping tsp curry powder
- 1 tsp fennel seed
- 1/2 tsp celery seed
- 1 heaping tsp smoked salt *
- pinky finger-sized piece of raw, peeled ginger
- couple of small Thai peppers (I used dried Thai peppers with today's batch)
- enough ramps to fill a wide mouth mason pint jar. maybe 1 1/2 lb bunch, cut at the stem so that they fit into the jar vertically
Pickling ingredients ready to go.
1. Wash and sterilize one or two wide mouth mason jars, their lids and bands. Sterilize by setting them in a pot of water to cover and bring it to a boil. After they've boiled for a few minutes set them out on a clean towel to dry.
2. Boil enough water to immerse the ramps in and set up another bowl with cold water and ice cubes. As soon as the water is boiling put the ramps in for about 30 seconds (it's a mighty quick bath to soften them up). As soon as that 30 seconds is up pull them out of the boiling water with a set of salad tongs and plunge them into the ice bath. Let them sit in the ice water until you're finished with the pickling solution.
3. Add the vinegar and all of the other ingredients except for the ginger and Thai peppers to a pot and bring it to a boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar and salt, and mixing everything else real well. Let it boil (keep stirring) for a minute or two.
4. Remove the ramps from the ice bath and stuff them bulb end down into the jar. Place the piece of ginger and the Thai peppers into the jar with the ramps (I place them on the outside edge so they are visible, for no other reason than because I like the way it looks). If the ramps are taller than the height of the jar you can take a scissors and cut them down while they're still in the jar, or bend them into the jar.
5. Pour the hot pickling solution into a Pyrex measuring pitcher (I use a 2-cup pitcher) so that it's easier and less messy pouring the solution into the mason jar. Pour the pickling solution into the jar of ramps, separating them a bit with a butter knife as you slowly pour so that the seeds and spices mix in well amongst the ramps.
6. Wipe the edge of the jar with a clean towel or wash-cloth and seal with the lid and band. That's it! Now let them sit for at least a day to soak up all that good pickling flavor and color. Most refrigerator style pickling recipes say that you ought to use them up within a week or so, and that's probably worthwhile advice, but I've eaten refrigerator pickles (ramps, cukes, tomatoes, squash, radishes, etc) that have been in my fridge for months and they've always been good. But that's me.
* A word on pickling spice: You can get ready-made pickling spice almost anywhere, or you can make it yourself. There are any number of easily found recipes for it and it is kind of cool to tailor make your own pickling spice. I have come to like a pre-made pickling spice I get from a small Amish country store in north-central Wisconsin. It contains mustard seed, allspice, coriander, cassia, ginger, peppers, cloves, bay leaves and a few other spices. It's got a richer, more clovey, liqueur-like aroma, to my nose, than other pickling spices I've tried.
* I normally don't use smoked salt like I did with this particular batch, but I acquired a jar of wickedly strong smoked salt from my friend Dixie a few weeks ago and have been using it where the opportunity seems appropriate. I only put a teaspoon of it into this mix but didn't really notice it in the final product. So, I think with the next batch I may up that amount to a full tablespoon and see what happens.
These Curried Pickled Ramps are delicious, if I do say so myself. They make a fantastic garnish or a side vegetable all by themselves (as you see in the photo of today's lunch). I've also used them to great effect in sandwiches. They have a great Middle Eastern flavor from the curry, and they look beautiful, with the turmeric and curry turning them to a bright neon-y yellow.
Curried Pickled Ramps...mighty good eating.
After I pickled the bulbs and stalks I had a lot of ramp leaves left over. So, I decided to pickle some of those as well. This time I used the same pickling recipe but left out the turmeric, curry, ginger and smoked salt. I didn't blanch the leaves either, but rather stacked several upon one another and then rolled them into three separate, tight little bundles (see images). I stuffed the bundles into the mason jar and poured the hot pickling solution over them, sealed it up and placed it in the fridge. I'm not sure what I'll do with them yet, but I'm thinking that they will probably be great on sandwiches, chopped up in a salad, as part of a rice or pasta dish, wrapped around some cheese, or any number of other possibilities. I'll let you know how they turn out.
Two images above: rolling ramp leaves before pickling.
Pickled ramp leaves and Curried Pickled Ramps.
After that jar of pickled ramp leaves I still had plenty of them left over, so I made a couple jars of pesto with them, following the recipe for ramp pesto I posted a couple weeks ago.
Two jars of ramp leaf pesto. Gave one to friend Kim Geiser.
Finally, I had maybe a dozen leaves left and, not wanting to waste anything, I tore them up and took them out to the ducks to see if they'd eat them. The ducks didn't seem very interested in the ramp leaves, only nibbling at a few. But later when I checked on them I noticed that there were no ramp leaves on the floor of the enclosure, so maybe they enjoyed them after all.
We've got ducks!
An interesting thing happened on the way to dinner the other night. What began as a simple plan to enjoy a duck dinner has instead become our first foray into the world of urban farming with animals.
Our friend, chef Christine Mittnacht, told me some weeks ago that she was going to be butchering several of her ducks. I asked her if I could get one from her, but that she could just give me the live animal and I would take care of the killing and cleaning myself in order to save a few dollars. As a hunter I have of course cleaned a great many critters, and dealing with one duck is quick work.
Not this time...
Cheyenne petitions the warden for the duck's stay of execution.
I made the stupid but predictable mistake of letting my daughters see and hold the duck when I came home with it. Suddenly he had three allies (Kim had immediately joined the two girls in his defense) who were adamant in their protests and pleas to spare his life. It didn't help that the duck also had a little water in one eye as Cheyenne was holding him. Jesse blurted out, "Daddy, look! He's crying!"
Jesse made urgent promises to be a responsible duck owner.
I really hadn't expected such a passionate response from them. These were, after all, my daughters who used to hunt with me when they were little. They knew what meat acquisition was all about. But I did find their attachment to and defense of the duck rather endearing, and I thought it would be cool if they did want to take on the responsibility of caring for him. So I relented and had them make all of the promises that parents make their kids promise when they beg for a new pet.
An old machine parts barrel serves as a hutch.
I threw a couple pictures of the girls holding the duck up on facebook, got justifiably laughed at for my lack of spine, subsequently acquired two additional hens from Christine (who messaged me with what I felt was an extra long "hahahahahaaaaaaa") and spent the next two days building a run in the backyard for the trio to live in.
In their new home.
We had planned on getting chickens and/or ducks at some point anyway. It was on the agenda. It just came a little earlier and in a manner slightly askew from the original plan. The ladies have named their fowl: Cheyenne's is the drake, she calls him Cornelius; Jesse calls her brown and white hen Chloe; and after some consternation Kim has settled on Lucky for her black hen. Christine said they are a mixed breed, "barnyard mutts...part pekin, part khaki campbell." Barnyard mutts, I like that.
First egg, I think from Lucky. 4/10/12
Yesterday we received our first egg. A very exciting discovery it was. I still have a bit of work to do on the run and coop (like installing a door), and the ducks are still a bit skittish in their new surroundings. But I'm having fun with them and so is everyone else. Their muted quacking and clucking is almost meditative, their conversations with one another are lively and physically expressive, with a good deal of head bobbing and mutual beak rubbing, and their excitement each time a full pail of clean water is set in the run is entertaining, to say the least.
Cheyenne saying good morning to the trio.
David's tip for the day: Unless you're ready and willing to become a "duck farmer" don't let your daughters hold, pet or name any duck you have intended for the table.
As I was finishing this blog entry this morning we got another egg, this time from Jesse's girl Chloe.
The beautiful, invasive, edible daylily
I almost can't believe it's been 10 days since I updated this site. So much has gone on in the last week or two that the time has seemed to just flash by. I think I'll be adding updates daily for the next several days, just to cover everything that's been going on.
But today's entry has to do with this morning's breakfast. Yesterday I stopped by my Mom's house after a little foraging hike into a new area (found another ramp trove, young nettles and garlic mustard, as well as a number of young may apples just lifting themselves up from the earth). My Dad is in Alabama for a couple weeks, visiting his brother and doing some fishing, so I stopped by the house to see if Mom needed anything and to check the rhubarb she said was coming up in the back yard.
Image of daylily flower from onlyfoods.net, where there is also some nutritional information listed on daylilies.
As we walked around the perimeter of the yard I was amazed to see how over-run part of it was with daylilies (hemerocallis fulva), or tiger lilies as we've always called them. Shoots from three to ten inches high covered one whole section of the yard next to the house and were dozens more were creeping around the corner and into the ground around a tree. Mom complained that they were pushing into areas where she didn't want them. No problemo, says I, as I grabbed a garden fork and immediately dug up a half dozen or so.
Daylilies showing young shoots/stalks and the root system with small tubers.
I washed the roots off and placed them in a large bowl of water overnight to further loosen any remaining dirt. Daylilies are edible but not all lilies are daylilies. Some can make you very sick indeed. The common daylily or tiger lily is easy to identify, particularly when it is in full flower. The young, flowerless shoots have sword-like leaves and when cut at ground level the stalk resembles a leek in its multiple ringed layers. The real tell-tale sign is in the root. Rather than growing from a single bulb cluster like an Easter lily, daylily roots are a medusa-like tangle of tendrils and little tubers that look like small fingerling potatoes.
Daylily tubers soaking in cold water to clean.
Every part of the daylily is edible, to one degree or another. The best parts, in my opinion, are the unopened flower buds, followed by the flowers themselves, which can be used like you might a squash blossom. Unfortunately, it's still too early here for the buds and flowers to appear. But the stalks and root tubers are available now.
Cleaned and trimmed stalks and tubers; bottom image shows the interior of the small tubers.
When preparing them I take the shoots and cut the stalks off where they meet the root system. Wash the stalks under running water and trim the side leaves and upper, looser leaves, leaving a fairly tight single stalk. The smallest ones I will toss in a salad or stir fry whole. The larger ones I slice perpendicularly like you might with a leek, and use those pieces the same way, in a salad or stir fry. The stalks are fairly bland, tasting to me like a cross between romaine lettuce and a very mild radish. But they can add some color, nutrition and variety to any number of dishes.
The root tubers require more cleaning but are interesting and kind of fun to work with. Maybe it's because they look like baby baby potatoes...the cuteness factor, I suppose. Separate the little tubers from the tendrils and stems, and wash thoroughly. I wash them in a large bowl, agitating and rubbing handfuls of them together through a few changes of water. The interior of the tubers is whitish and the meat has the texture of a common radish. They're rather mild. When eaten raw they also exhibit an interesting flavor that is slightly sweet but with a mild radish-like, peppery after-taste. Apparently there is a small percentage of the population who may find daylilies disagreeable to their systems. I think I may be on the edge of that group of people, as I find that whenever I eat them raw in anything more than a very small quantity I suffer a little nausea. It's not too dissimilar to the feeling I get when I eat a lot of raw onions or radishes; a kind of gut-achy, nauseous feeling comes over me (but I still eat onions and radishes because I just like them too darn much!). However, cooking seems to nullify whatever substance is in them that causes the discomfort when they are eaten raw.
Breakfast of eggs with ramp pesto and a daylily hash.
This morning I browned some butter with diced garlic and ramps, added several slices of pancetta and threw in a handful of daylily tubers (slicing the larger ones in half) along with a pinch of salt. As they were finshing I added a few sliced stalks to the mix and let it saute for another minute or two. Scooped them from the pan and quickly fried a couple of eggs over-easy, spooned a little ramp pesto over the tops, and that was breakfast. I might add that the tubers smell, to me, a little like peanuts while frying. I wonder if anyone else has that impression as well.
Daylily tubers & stalks, pancetta, garlic and ramps sauteed in hand rolled butter.
Daylilies, a common decorative yard flower; also good to eat. I'll let you know when the flower buds and flowers are table ready!
Ramp pesto
My Dad phoned me yesterday while he was out on one of his local exploring mini-expeditions. "I found a place covered with wild onions. They're all over." "Already?" I replied. "It's little early yet." I have my spots that I start checking around this time of year and thus far no ramps have made an appearance.
"Where are you?" I asked. He told me and I said, "Well, why don't you come get me and we'll have a look?" He was a bit further inland than where I begin looking for the dagger-shaped leaves around this time of year, enough so that the cool Lake Michigan temperatures weren't a factor in slowing spring growth like they are closer to the lake.
I retrieved a couple of bags, my old digging knife and a camera and waited for my Dad to show up. Upon arriving at the place he had found I had to admit that he had indeed come upon a good location for spring ramps ("wild onions" to Dad). Although they were still relatively small in size they were growing thickly, with little bunches more or less uniformly covering a pretty large expanse of ground.
Young ramps bursting through the earth in early spring.
I was excited and harvested just a couple of handfuls-worth, while planning to return to the spot in another week or two.
Just-harvested ramps. It's not cool to harvest too much. Be frugal and leave more than you take.
Ramps, also known as wild leeks or wild onions, are one of the first wild edibles a lot of folks learn to identify and harvest. That may be because they are also one of the first edibles to make an appearance each spring. They are hard to mistake for anything else once you've harvested them yourself. They also seem to have become much more popular (trendy might be a better word) with chefs in recent years, and you'll find them on menus in a number of noteworthy restaurants.
Ramps have an intense flavor that's something of a marriage of green onion and garlic, and you can use them just about any way you might use either or both of those vegetable herbs. When the morels begin to appear a plate of grilled morel mushrooms and ramps, washed down with a nice ale, is practically tradition.
Ramps after cleaning, beautiful and colorful.
This morning I decided to make a pesto from the bunch I dug up yesterday. I'll share the recipe here, but bear in mind that the ingredient amounts are entirely arbitrary. Pesto is one of those things that can be made any number of ways with any number of ingredients and any number of mutable measurements.
Ramp & Arugula Pesto
Ingredients:
- Ramps, one large handful
- Arugula, 3/4 cup
- Extra Virgin Olive Oil, 1/2+ cup
- Almonds, 1/2 cup, toasted
- Parmesan or Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, 1 cup, shaved
- Pinch of salt
- Freshly ground pepper, just a couple turns of the pepper mill
Ramp pesto ingredients, romaine and baby spinach I added later not shown.
1. Toast the almonds in an oven at 400° for around 10 minutes. They smell oh-so-good! Roughly chop them up and pour into your food processor. Give it a few pulses to chop them even more.
2. Roughly chop the ramps, leaves and all. Add the chopped ramps, arugula, oil, cheese, salt and pepper to the processor. Pulse it until everything is well blended. You may want to add more oil until it gets to a consistency you like.
Ramp & arugula pesto, ready to rock your taste buds.
That's pretty well it. Easy-peasy. But now here is where the adaptable nature of pesto comes in handy. I found that my initial recipe was far too pungent. I knew that Kim would find it too spicy and "hot" for her taste. So I grabbed a handful of baby spinach and three big leaves of romaine lettuce, tossed them into the processor and pulsed it to blend everything together. Perfect! The spinach and romaine mellowed it out quite nicely. The finished pesto looked fantastic, a beautiful vibrant green, and it had a spicy freshness that made spring seem even more spring-y.
Eager to use the ramp pesto right away, I whipped up a huge omelet with a row of canned diced tomatoes and a strip of the pesto spooned over them before folding the omelet over on itself. I cut the fat egg pie in half and plated one half for Kim and the other for me. It was incredible. I am not making this up--go ahead and ask her--Kim actually licked her plate clean. That's how good it was.
The pesto will stay fresh in your fridge for a month or so, if it lasts that long before you eat it all!
After we finished breakfast I jarred the remaining pesto into an empty gelato container and thought, "I would totally buy this if it was on a store shelf. Someone should make this stuff to sell." Someone like me! (Let me know if you would like a jar.)
Maple Syrup
This month I had the pleasure to learn the craft of making maple syrup with Jack Kretsch of Kretsch Family Maple Syrup. Jack and his wife Bonnie live outside of Manitowoc, near Whitelaw, where they have a hundred or so sugar maple tap lines running each year at the close of winter. I knew the high quality of Kretsch maple syrup because we used it for our Sunday morning breakfasts at Stumpjack, in our special french toast (I must remember to share that recipe here) and our baked oatmeal. Kretsch Maple Syrup a relatively small operation and their syrup is something special; it's sweet but not cloyingly so, it is lighter in color, golden brown rather than the dark, caramelized brown you see in many syrups. It's a natural and pure artisan syrup with a flavor that is entirely unadulterated.
Tap lines one a large maple tree. On one of the days we collected sap we harvested 277 gallons.
I told Jack's daughter Heather last year that if they desired any help with the maple syrup production I would be eager to join in, so that I might learn some of their secrets for producing the delicious elixir (yes, I've enjoyed it right from the glass, straight up, no chaser). Heather contacted me and said that her dad could, in fact, use a little help with this season's harvest and production. I was excited to be of assistance wherever I could. Unfortunately, I didn't get to help nearly as much as I had hoped, because the season was cut short by the uncharacteristic warm weather we've had this year. I was hoping to participate all the way through April but this year's season lasted just three weeks. Jack confirmed that last weekend was pretty well the end of it. The nights were not getting cold enough to produce the kind of sap flow they needed.
Wood burning stove that cooks the sap and steel pail collected cooked syrup through a filter.
But I did get three or four days in where I got to lend a hand collecting sap and hanging out with Jack in his sugar shack while he processed the sap into syrup. I wasn't able to be there when he did the final filtering and bottling, which bummed me out a bit because I wanted to get photos of every step during the process. Next year.
.
Jack Kretsch shrouded in steam inside his sugar shack as he cooks maple sap into maple syrup.
I took a lot of photos and a little bit of video, and I learned a lot and had a great time getting to know Jack. (I may have to profile him in a future article; the man does a heckuva lot of interesting things and is quite a character.) I shared the photos on my facebook page; the few shown here are from that album.
Jack in his poker room with a couple bottles of Kretsch Family Maple Syrup.
I told Jack that I have a small maple tree in my yard, and he gave me a tap, line and pail to see what I might be able to draw from it. It's a small diameter tree that I planted maybe 15 or so years ago from a little sprout that was growing in the hedge row between us and our neighbor. It shot up like a weed and is as tall as our two-story home now. I didn't get much sap from it, only a gallon or so. Last night I boiled down what I had collected and was very excited to be able to bottle some maple syrup. It was a damn small bottle (a former hot sauce bottle), but it's maple syrup I actually made myself from my own tree. And that's a pretty sweet deal.
My own maple syrup. Next year I intend to pursue making maple syrup on a larger scale.
I'll follow this entry up with one that goes into the actual process of making maple syrup, and will share some of the lessons I learned from Jack that I think help set his syrup apart from some of the others on the market.
More wine
We had more apple pulp at the end of last fall than we had carboys to ferment it in. So I placed it all in lidded pails and let it sit outside all winter (I figured it was cold enough, and it did stay frozen through much of the winter). With the recent warm weather we've had I also thought I better follow up with that cache of pulp before it fermented too much, got moldy or turned to vinegar. So, last Friday I squeezed the juice from the pulp, filled a large carboy with it, poured in a couple of cups of blueberry pomegranate juice to top it off, added pectic enzyme and wine yeast, and capped it with an airlock.
The over-wintered juice had a subtle though decidedly wine-like flavor and aroma already. Clearly the pulp had fermented to some degree before I extracted the juice. So, we'll see how it turns out, and right now it is fermenting away with the airlock doing its little dance at an efficient pace.
I also racked and bottled from three gallon-sized jugs that had been fermenting, two of apple wine and one of marigold wine. The two apple wines were made from juice from the same batch of foraged apples but I used a different yeast for each jug: one a Lalvin EC-1118 and the other a Pasteur Champagne yeast. The wine made with the champagne yeast did indeed have a champagne-like quality to it. It was drier and slightly "fizzy." I think it still needs to age for a few months in the bottle before drinking.
Just bottled marigold and apple wines.
The EC-1118 wine was delicious right away. We'll probably drink that up over the next few weeks. We did set aside one of the bottles for our friend Steph Davies as a small gift for the Grand Opening of her new art gallery in Milwaukee, called Waxwing.
A label I quickly sketched and glue-sticked to the bottle for the Waxwing opening.
The marigold wine definitely needs some time to age further, and I'll check it in another couple of months. It is beautiful wine though, with a lovely rose color. We got five bottles each from the apple wine jugs and four from the marigold wine jug.
Today I racked and bottled the carboy of apple wine to which we had added cloves and cinnamon. I suppose you could call it a mulled wine, although it is not as rich in spice as the kind of mulled wine you might make on your stovetop. We added cloves and cinnamon sticks during the last two months of the second fermentation. I think this wine will be a good one after it ages a bit longer. We got 23 bottles from that batch.
Apple wine with clove and cinnamon.
We've got one large carboy of highbush cranberry wine yet to bottle. That particular batch has a story all its own, which I'll share when I bottle it.
Making mustard is so easy
We did a little grocery shopping last week and picked up, among other things, one of those inexpensive small hams, the kind that you just keep in the fridge and pull out to carve a few slices for a sandwich whenever the mood hits. Earlier today, hungry but in a bit of a hurry and not wanting to spend time cooking, I did just that. I quickly slapped together a simple ham & cheese sandwich, with mustard and mayonnaise. Nothing special.
It filled me up but left me profoundly unsatisfied. In fact I actually felt a little peeved after eating it. I knew this ham would be mostly bland and flavorless when I bought it. But it was cheap and I figured it would serve its purpose well enough.
Not today. Everything about that sandwich irked me: the fact that I spent money on something I normally would not have, the blandness of it all, even the predictable flavors of factory-made mustard and mayo. It was like that once-a-year urge I get to eat fast food, which is always followed by a feeling of regret and self recrimination.
So, what does one do when one's foodie mojo has been sullied? He makes mustard, that's what! Making your own mustard (and other condiments) is one of the most simple and easy things you can do in the kitchen, and can markedly improve just about any dish or recipe you make.
mustard seeds
At its simplest all you need to make a good mustard is mustard seed and a liquid binder of some sort (vinegar or even water, for example). Of course there are countless other ingredients you can use to customize a condiment like mustard. I had an old, almost empty bottle of Apple Pie Liqueur I had squirreled away from when we were making appletinis at Stumpjack a couple years ago. I thought the apple liqueur might provide a nice element of sweetness and that the alcohol would offer a bit of additional preservation to the mix. I've also been drying some raw ginger lately and thought that might add a nice cooling element to mustard seed's natural heat.
mustard seed and dried ginger
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup mustard seed
- 1/4 cup cider vinegar
- 1/4 cup Apple Pie Liqueur
- 1 tsp turmeric
- 1/2 tsp grated dried ginger
- pinch of sea salt
- water
1. I grated the dried ginger with a microplane (which smells divine) and added it and the turmeric to the mustard seed. Turmeric has a potent earthy flavor and the color is wonderful.
2. I then added the seed/turmeric/ginger mix to a coffee grinder and processed it into a fine powder.
ground mustard, ginger, turmeric
3. Transfer the powdered mix to a bowl, add the Apple pie Liqueur and cider vinegar and mix well with a spoon.
4. Salt to taste.
5. Add water a tablespoon at a time and keep mixing until you get the consistency you want. I added 5 tablespoons water total.
That's it. The flavors come together and mellow out after sitting for a day or two (or three), although this recipe has a fairly solid whoa! factor. Spoon the mixture into a jar, cover it and set it in the fridge...after you smear some on another ham sandwich or piece of sausage and congratulate yourself for making something so darn tasty!
the finished mustard