Hot Mustard Recipe

My hubby is obsessed with the hot mustard you get at Chinese restaurants.  He simply can not eat Chinese food without hot mustard and chopsticks.  So a couple of years ago I bought him some plastic chopsticks and some hot mustard powder at our Asian market so he could eat the stuff I served without noticing how awful it was.  Worked like a charm!  We just mixed the powder with water and ta-da!  Mustard so hot it made our eyes burn and totally masked the flavor of the food we were eating.  Perfect.

However, the powder eventually ran out and the hubby was very sad.  I don’t go to the Asian market often so he suffered in silence for a while, until a knight in shining armor came along to rescue him from his hot-mustardless Chinese food.  My friend Dewey (the same Dewey of one-minute mayonnaise fame) let me in on a secret.  Do you know what’s in hot mustard?  Just two ingredients.  Ground mustard and water.  (!)  When you mix the two, a chemical reaction occurs which makes the mustard very hot.  That prepared mustard you put on your hot dogs and sandwiches has vinegar in it, which neutralizes the heat.  How cool (or hot, in this case) is that?  That is science-cool!

I checked the label on that empty “hot mustard” powder tin and found that, indeed, the only ingredients were ground mustard and turmeric (for added color).  So I tested Dewey’s “recipe” and sure enough, it’s just like the stuff you get at the restaurants!  It’s enough to make me want to do a little happy dance.

2 parts Ground Mustard Seed
1 part Water

Put as much mustard powder into a small bowl as you think you’ll need and add half that amount in water.  I used 2 teaspoons of mustard, 1 teaspoon of water and that was enough for two meals. Store extra in the fridge.  Dewey says maximum heat is reached after 30 minutes, but it will be very hot instantly per our experience.  He also says that the heat will diminish over time, but the extra we stored in the fridge overnight seemed just as hot the next day and we’ve stored hot mustard in the fridge for up to a month and it was still pretty hot so it apparently never gets mild over time, just loses some of that pungent intense heat after a while.

Recipe source: Dewey B.