You Need purple mustard in your pantry

In French there’s a saying: “…se croire le premier moutardier du pape.” Roughly translated, it means, “he thinks he’s the pope’s mustard maker.” It describes someone who’s perhaps a bit too proud of himself. The story goes that Pope John XXII got a hankering for the unique purple mustard of his hometown in southwestern France, so he called up his nephew (or sent him a letter, or a papal carrier pigeon—however popes got in touch with their nephews 650 years ago) and invited him to the papal palace to be his own personal mustard maker. I wonder if he just liked purple for its royal connotations, or if he couldn’t bear meals without his hometown mustard?

Despite the papal seal of approval, that purple mustard never really made it big.

When Elie-Arnaud Denoix started making mustard at his family’s cognac distillery in the Périgord region of southwestern France, the purple mustard of his childhood was all but extinct. He decided to revive it, and after a year of making batch after batch of it, he landed on a recipe that he thought tasted like the traditional product. To verify his tastebuds’ intuition, he took it to a nearby village and gave it to as many of the older townsfolk as he could, the ones who grew up eating it. He asked them if it was the mustard they remembered. Half of them told him it was exactly right; half of them said it was completely wrong. Elie counted that as success and started production.

Denoix’s violet mustard is purple because it’s half grape juice.

More specifically, it’s grape must: freshly pressed juice that includes stuff like skins, seeds, and stems. Using grape must is a very old way to make mustard. The word “mustard” actually derives from the Latin mustum (grape must) and ardens  (burning), so I’d bet the mustard eaten in ancient Rome looked a lot like violet mustard. By 1407 mustard makers in Dijon, France had switched from using must to vinegar and most of the mustard world followed suit. In Périgord vinegar was more precious as medicine than as food, so they kept using must.

Elie usually uses local grapes for the must, and he looks for ones with a lot of color and sugar. After the juice is pressed it’s heated to evaporate the water and concentrate the flavor. Then he adds the must to a blend of two mustard seeds: mostly there are a lot of milder yellow seeds, but he also includes a small amount of more pungent black seeds. The mix is ground very lightly in a stone mill, leaving lots of the seeds intact and making the mustard a bit crunchy.

Mustard is at its spiciest about 15 minutes after it’s mixed together, but most of us are unlikely to ever try it that fresh unless we make our own. From there it gets mellower with time. Since the violet mustard is meant to be sweet and mellow, Elie ages each 200-pound batch for eight weeks before jarring it. The result is a remarkably soft and sweet mustard with only the barest whisper of heat.

By the way, there are no violets—as in the flowers—in this mustard, as I assumed when I first heard about it. The “violet” is in the name is because violet is the French word for purple.

Violet mustard is really, really good with cheese.

I especially love it paired with the Manchester  made by Zingerman’s Creamery—together they’re earthy, tangy, creamy and crunchy from the caviar pop you get from biting down on the whole mustard seeds. (We sell those two paired together in their own gift box.) Elie really likes violet mustard with blue cheese. He also likes it with boudin sausage and cooked apples, a traditional way to serve violet mustard in Périgord. Blended with a bit of  balsamic, it also makes an incredible sauce for a steak—and if the current pope had his own personal violet mustard maker, I’d bet that, given his Argentinian roots, that’s how he’d want it served.

Did I Mention That Portuguese Sardines In Pure Olive Oil Are On Sale Right Now?
PORTUGUESE SARDINES IN PURE OLIVE OIL Was $7, now $4	PORTUGUESE SARDINES IN EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL $9	ORTIZ TUNA Was $8, now $5	FARM BREAD $8.50 – $14
COUSCOUS $12	IL MONGETTO TOMATO SAUCE Was $12, now $7.50	RUSTICHELLA PASTA Was $9, now $5	FALLOT DIJON MUSTARD $8.50

March 7, 2014

Great gifts for your loved ones

Gift Boxed Cookies
These handsome presents are ready to give, great for your host and handy for travel.

Six to choose from:

• apricot and currant walnut rugelach
• raspberry and chocolate rugelach
• citrus almond mandelbrot
• chocolate and vanilla bean macaroons 
• Hungarian almond kifli cookies
• fancy schmancy holiday cookies (includes pecan butter balls, orange anise shortbread and chocolate cherry chewies)

Cranberry Pecan Bread
Available EVERY DAY in november & December!
When we sample it, there’s a phenomenon of customers who grab a piece as they’re leaving and come back a few minutes later asking “What did I just eat? That’s amazing!” This bread is a magic combination of our San Francisco Sourdough, toasty pecans, and dried New England cranberries.

Available at: Zingerman’s Bakehouse, Zingerman’s Deli, Zingerman’s Roadhouse and at Zingerman’s Mail Order

Stollen
A holiday staple at the Bakehouse that seems to get more popular each year we bake it. Stollen is a traditional German holiday bread made with sweet butter, Bacardi rum, candied lemon and orange peel, oranges, Michigan dried cherries, citron, currants, almonds, sultanas, real vanilla and more.

Olive Oil Cake
You might think our butter-laden coffeecakes would be the most luscious cakes we bake, but you’d be mistaken. Extra-virgin olive oil is the fat du jour here and it makes this cake’s texture especially luxurious. Olive oil retains more moisture than butter so it’s soft and silky, like it just came out of the oven, even days after you take it home. Made with toasted almonds, lemon zest—nearly a whole lemon’s worth per cake—and lots of extra-virgin olive oil. It has a great balance of sweet, savory and tangy that lingers long after the last bite.

Give­ the ­Gift­ of­ BAKE!
Is dad ready to learn how to make his first perfect pie crust? Want your friends to join you for a pizza-making party? Do you want to send mom on a BAKE!®-cation? Give ‘em a BAKE! gift card and let your loved ones pick the class that’s right for them!
Call ­734.761.7255­ for­ more ­information­­ about­ giving ­the­ gift­ of ­BAKE!

*From time to time, we share the writing of our friends and co-workers on this site. Today’s guest post comes from the blog of Zingerman’s Mail Order Managing Partner, Mo Frechette. You can read Mo’s blog here. 

Why is one tinned tuna better than another?

Take two tins of tuna, one from Ortiz, one typical of the supermarket. One smells like the sweet sea, peels off in thick blond chunks and tastes like a fancy dinner out. The other smells like harbor at low tide, spoons out in pulpy shreds and tastes like saltwater. They came from the same animal living in the same ocean. What happened? Here are five buyer’s guide tips to understand what makes one tinned tuna different from another.

1. How are the tuna fished?
Bonito tuna, a common species for tinning, are not big fish. Most are two feet long and weigh about ten pounds. They’re warm-blooded. Taken together that means any bruising or bleeding affects a large portion of each fish and muddies its flavor. That’s rare with Ortiz’s tuna since they are entirely line-caught, classic fisherman style, one at a time on a rod. It’s more common with netted fish—the most common way to catch tuna, where hundred foot long nets drag the tuna in a thrashing bundle up from the sea.

2. How are they stored at sea?
Tuna are stored in a boat’s hold on ice. A more conscientious captain will freight a lot of ice, enough to surround each fish so they don’t touch one another and cool down quickly. After all, no one knows how long they’ll be at sea or how much they’ll catch and the fish starts to deteriorate the moment it’s caught.

3. What happens after they’re cooked?
Cooking canned tuna is more or less standardized: the fish is boiled in salted water for a couple hours. But what happens next is not at all the same from factory to factory. At Ortiz the just-cooked fish sits out to cool in the kitchen, then gets time to chill in cold storage. The two steps take hours and hog up space on the floor and in the refrigerators. Not all tuna makers choose to take it.  Like most food makers who worry about price more than flavor, they cut time out of the equation. What the extra time and care does, though, is critical. It stops the fish from fermenting. Fermenting can be ruinous—a carbonation that makes the tins unsalable—or it can be mild. Even mild fermentation has a flavor that, to my taste, is a sour tang that runs throughout most tins of cheap tuna and mars its sea-sweet origins.

4. How are they cleaned?
Another act of grace Ortiz commits after cooking is to clean its tuna by hand. This is as labor-intensive as it sounds (if you’ve ever deboned and skinned cooked fish you know what I mean). It’s not at all standard practice in the tuna world. The women—and I can say from my experience visiting that 100% of the cleaners are women—work meticulously with paring knives, scraping and cleaning every bruise, every discoloration, every chance for the flavor to head south, leaving only pristine fish to find their way into the tin.

5. What goes into the tin?
Whole chunks of fish and olive oil. That’s it. No flakes, no water. That’s the way you get great tinned tuna. Shredded smaller pieces deteriorate faster and that will show in the flavor. As for olive oil, well, the American tuna industry has pawned off water-packed tuna as healthier but what they failed to mention was that in losing 20% of the calories we lost 98% of the taste. Water leaches flavor from the fish. Ortiz only packs in olive oil, which amplifies the tuna’s flavor and gives it a silky, rich mouthfeel.

Ortiz Tuna is available from Zingerman’s Mail Order and at the Zingerman’s Deli! Isn’t it time to taste the good stuff?