Mustard

 I once put up a very similar post to this one, but my views below are, I think, worth echoing. I will no doubt discover a number of people who disagree with this. I consider Coleman’s English mustard kills flavour. The powdered version is useful for dusting beef, for making fresh horseradish sauce or as an ingredient in many other dishes (eg barbecue sauce). I occasionally like the very process of making it using the powder and adding water and leaving to rest. But my mustard of choice is Dijon: sufficient piquancy but not robbing the underlying dish of flavour. A slightly milder but still pleasing mustard is coarse grain. I would prefer either to English (too hot), American (too sweet), or German (too oddly flavoured). And I have never understood why in England if you ask for French mustard a revoltingly sweet brown concoction is produced that has been nowhere near France; it is almost as though it is an attempt to put people off French mustard in favour of English. Indeed I would prefer English to THAT particular variety despite my prejudices away from English. For completeness, I also reject whisky, truffle or any other weirdly flavoured mustard. Again, mustard is so strongly flavoured that I don’t see the point. Other than tarragon mustard which is rather good. Enough from me.

Rhubarb soufflé

This is my own version, based on lots of different recipes I found online. From sources as diverse as “The Times of India” and The Express. Not a single one of the recipes I found was quite right - and any containing cornflour I am afraid I rejected at once.

INGREEDIENCE

300g rhubarb

25g sugar (to mix with raw rhubarb)

Glug of elderflower syrup

3 tablespoons golden caster sugar (to mix with egg whites)

4 egg whites

2 egg yolks

METHOD

Chop the rhubarb into roughly 1.5 inch chunks. Mix with 25g sugar and glug of elderflower syrup. Bake for 25 mins in oven gas mark 9. Mash rhubarb. Allow to cool.

Beat egg whites. Fold in sugar and egg yolks. Finally add rhubarb. Stir together. Spoon into 6 ramekins. Will probably make 7 so one spare.

Bake ramekins for 8 mins on gas mark 9.

Eat.