"If you go to a BBQ place & they have a seafood salad on the menu, don't eat the BBQ!"
I am finally caught up on things I have to do and it’s still to wet for outside chores, so I have a chance to do a couple of things that have been on my back burner. The first one is to put the new jerky gun to use to make some faux jerky from ground beef for Alex and the second is to make some homemade mustard.
I’d used the jerky gun to make a cylinder of stuffing for some fatties, but had not yet used it for jerky. My spices got here from High Mountain Seasonings last week and I remembered to get the ground beef out of the freezer yesterday, so I’m good to go. Here’s all that was needed to do this job.
I just mixed in the seasoning and cure per the directions and stuck it in the fridge for 5 hours to get happy – as Emeril would say. Hands are the best tools for this job.
Then I made meatballs and damped them down in the gun then extruded it onto the racks. I decided to just make 2#, since it was my first try.
They went into the oven at 200* for 1 hr, 20 min - I assume that since it’s ground meat, it must be fully cooked in addition to dried. Here are the racks of finished product.
Well it’s definitely not jerky, but it is pretty tasty and I look forward to making more, however next time I'll use 90% lean ground meat and cook it longer. Not bad for a first try and I may have to get some small casings and make some snack sticks and smoke them.
Homemade Mustard
I’d seen a recipe and pictures of homemade mustard some time ago on the “BBQ Central” BBQ forum (http://www.bbq-4-u.com/forum/index.php) and I finally got the stuff I needed to make a batch. The key part was remembering to put it all together last night to be blended up today.
Recipe
3 Tablespoons Yellow Mustard Seed
2 1/2 Tablespoons Brown Mustard Seed
1/2 cup Cream Sherry
3/4 cup White Vinegar
1/4 cup Cider Vinegar
1 teaspoon Onion Powder
3/4 teaspoon Salt
1/2 teaspoon White Pepper
1 teaspoon Tumeric
pinch of Allspice
1. Put everything in a bowl and let sit overnight or longer. Pour it into a blender and blend until mustard like.
2. I leave it a bit chunky as that is how I like it but I have blended it almost smooth before. Also I have used all cider vinegar or white vinegar and it was still good. Although I substituted the sherry for Merlot or Sheraz (sp?) as I did friday, and other red wines and did not like it as much.
3. Allow to sit after blending for another day and it gets a little spicier.
Here are the ingredients.
Big Dude’s comments start here. I wasn’t for sure what crème sherry was so I did a search and up came Harvey’s Bristol Crème and I wondered what I would do with a whole bottle of the stuff – it comes in standard wine bottle size. After seeing it advertised around the holidays for what has to be a 100 years, I’d never tasted it– so naturally I had to have a little sample. It was, after all, open and I felt obligated. It was pretty tasty and reminded me a little of Madeira so I now know if I make no more mustard, it won’t go to waste – heck, it may not even make it til the next batch of mustard.
After sitting overnight, the mix still seemed too liquidy to me, but I dumped it in the blender and cranked it up.
What I ended up with is mustard flavored vinegar mix, so I did a little research and found an Emeril recipe using mustard seed and it has about half the liquid as I used. So, I doubled the amount of all the dry ingredients, let it set for six hours and tried again.
The consistency came out perfect this time and this is serious mustard – somewhat spicy and very flavorful – I won’t have to use much and I think I'm really going to like it. Looking forward to using it on something tomorrow.
Thats all for now, time to go watch the world series til I fall asleep.
Home made mustard .. this rocks!
ReplyDeleteSo, on the recipe you posted, does that double the dry ingredients like you did to make the nice thick mustard?
ReplyDelete