American chefs are now discovering the many charms of mustard oil.
I’m not the kind of guy that’s out there looking for the exotic,” says Edelman, who opened his new-American restaurant, Left Bank, this summer in the West Village. But while making his own mustard, he found an enticing ingredient from the East, mustard oil. Edelman now serves this pungent amber oil with lightly pickled mustard seeds on a frisée and cornichon salad with rich pig’s-head terrine.
“It’s got this clang to it,” he says, “It’s one of those things that once you get that taste of it, then all of a sudden everything is lacking mustard oil.”
Mustard oil’s silky heat and sinus-clearing vapours will ring a bell for South Asians, particularly in the Bengal region of eastern India and Bangladesh, where it flavours fish curries and mashed vegetable bhartas. It is also used as a massage oil, the only use for which it is legally approved in the United States. But more American chefs hunting for new flavours have discovered mustard oil. American chefs usually finish dishes with a trickle of the sharp raw oil, as Jean-Georges Vongerichten does with blanched mustard greens in his new book, Home Cooking With Jean-Georges: My Favorite Simple Recipes (Clarkson Potter).
Mustard oil is a key ingredient in the uni panini, a sandwich with a cult following at Alex Raij’s Chelsea tapas bar, El Quinto Pino. Playing on the Japanese pairing of sea urchin and wasabi, Raij mixes it into butter she slathers on a ficelle and tops with sea urchin. Ken Oringer says he discovered mustard oil when the Indian cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey made a guest-chef visit to his restaurant, Clio, in Boston. Now he marinates jalapeños in mustard oil for Indian-inspired pickles and poaches fish in mustard oil before searing it with Spanish paprika. “There’s no ingredient that comes close to it.”
Few American chefs have featured mustard oil as prominently as Michael Hodgkins, the former chef at Hung Ry, a hand-pulled-noodle shop in Manhattan. In his time there, Hodgkins used mustard oil as his go-to seasoning in everything from a simple salad dressing for shaved apples and local greens to a fried squid dish with fennel and coriander seeds, lime and honey. “It doesn’t have that thick, fatty texture that coats your mouth.” Until recently, good mustard oil was so hard to find in the US that Bengalis coming here would tuck a can into their suitcases. As the South Asian diaspora has spread, mustard oil imported from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan has become easy to find in specialised stores for about $5 a litre.
Although they are usually found on shelves of cooking oil, not massage oil, bottles of pure mustard oil sold in the United States must bear a warning: “For external use only.” Since the mid-1990s, the Food and Drug Administration has banned the import or sale of pure mustard oil as a foodstuff. Despite the rules, erucic acid levels in mustard oil are not necessarily dangerous, says Walter Willet, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. “The reality is that we are not really sure,” Willet writes in an e-mail, “the potential hazards are based on animal studies, and to my knowledge we don’t have real evidence of harm to humans.”
For some chefs, the warning is a badge of authenticity. Tom Valenti, chef and owner of Ouest in Manhattan, discovered mustard oil at Kalustyan’s, the international food store. “I decided to select the one that said ‘for external use only,’ figuring that was the one with the most horsepower,” he recalls. He says that he now uses a blended oil in his salmon gravlax on a chickpea pancake, drizzled with mustard-oil-steeped caviar. Customers love the dish, Valenti says. “I’ve gotten a couple of, ‘Woo, that’s spicy,’ with slightly watery eyes,” he says. “But there’s always a smile under those watery eyes.”
©2011 The New York Times