Making Mustard from Seed

We had mustard greens popping up all over the garden earlier in the year.  We let one of them go to seed just to see what happened and try to save some seeds.  The plant looked like some amazing alien thing, just this tall spindly little tree with pods all over it.  For some reason it didn’t occur to me at first that this is where mustard comes from!  And I love mustard, so I had to try making it from scratch!  I used this recipe as my base, but had to cut it in half because we had nowhere near ½ cup of seeds.  You can also just buy seeds at a grocery store if you don't want to wait for plants to mature.

We harvested the mustard by cutting all the branches with pods and shoving them into a brown paper bag.  Then let it sit out of direct sunlight for a couple weeks till the pods were completely dry.

Next came the incredibly time consuming task of deseeding the pods.  My boyfriend and I sat for hours cracking open pod after pod.  When we finally had our measly amount of seeds extracted (about ¼ cup), we added them to ⅟6 cup of water and let them soak for 10 minutes.  Then added ⅜ cup of apple cider vinegar and let it sit for 2 days in the refrigerator.  This site tells you everything you would ever want to know about mustard, which is where I learned to let the seeds soak in water for 10 minutes before adding the vinegar.  I also discovered here that using cold liquid helps preserve that bite that mustard has, which I definitely wanted.  But for more mellow mustard, warm liquids can be used.

Then we added ¾ tsp sugar and mashed the mixture up until it was somewhat creamy.  We put the mustard in a mason jar and then again had to wait a day or 2.  The mustard is really spicy at first, but mellows out after a couple days. 

Now I want to plant a whole bed up with mustard.  If only we had the space.  One day though!