Day 37 - The World of Mustards

So it turns out that I was wrong. I had assumed that a mustard I bought at a local farmer's market would be "legal" this year because it was from a local company. I don't know why I thought that would actually matter, but it turns out that Mom's Mustards (which has really fabulous mustards which I highly recommend to anyone NOT doing foolish food experiments) uses something called "calcium disodium edta" to preserve freshness. When one sells food to the general public, there are a lot of rules one must follow, and I'm assuming that is why the calcium whatzits is in there, but all the same, one of our rules is no ingredients we can't identify. So, I had a new quest to find allowable mustard.

It turns out that almost all commercial mustards (with the possible exception of the golden mustards used mainly for hotdogs, which I didn't actually check) contain something called "xanthum gum." I'm providing the link to Wikipedia on this one because I have read the entry several times and am only partially convinced that it is written in English, but what it seems to do is allow sauces to become more "liquid" when you shake them. It also seems to help if one is trying to drill mud or pour concrete under water so it's quite useful stuff, but it is definitely not allowed in our experiment.

After about 30 minutes at Fred Meyer (I think the staff started to think I was shoplifting or had a mustard fetish), I found 4 allowable mustards:
I was quite pleased the Kroger/Fred Meyer's garlic mustard made the cut, as it's really good stuff. The tabasco mustard is strictly for Andy--I like to remain on speaking terms with my stomach lining. Unfortunately, no Grey Poupon made the list. That was disappointing indeed, as we are big mustard fans and when we moved in together, combining two refrigerators produced a supply of 10 different mustards.

The good news? We can make mustard--including Dijon mustard! Now I just need to track down mustard seeds....maybe I'll wait until we're down to 2 jars....