At the BBC Good Food show last weekend we picked up some mustard seed blends for making our own mustard. So we’re going to make up some mustard to go on sourdough beef sandwiches.

Initial I hit the interwebs for a recipe and found one at the Grauniad. Sounds easy: water and cider vinegar on the seeds, with soe volume/weight ratio, wait a couple of days, then blend if you want it smooth. But the instructions on the packet were easier: just cover in vinegar and blend a couple of days later if you want it smooth. So I just covered half the pack in cider vinegar.

My 1kg sourdough loaf comes in at over 1.1kg, and the dough is rather dry at 67% hydration (it forms around the stand mixer hook almost immediately), so I’m going to try reducing the flours to come to an actual 1kg with 79% hydration.

Here’s the before and after table:

Production Bakers’ % ~1kg Wet Bakers’ % Wet 1kg Total Flour 100 500 100 400 White flour 70 350 70 280 Wholemeal flour 20 100 20 80 Rye flour 10 50 10 40 Starter 60 300 75 300 Water 60 300 75 300 Salt 2 10 2.5 10 Diastatic malt powder 2 10 2.5 10 Total 1120 1020 Dry 134 142.5 Wet 90 112.5 Hydration 67.16% 78.95%

The method remains the same: refresh, autolyse, bulk ferment with stretch and folds, shape, proof, bake in La Cloche.

It was, unsurprisingly, a wetter dough during bulk fermentation, but it had stiffened up well by the fourth stretch and fold. After proofing it didn’t look any different from my previous version.

After baking it looks great, but once again not that different from the previous version.

I’m trying the mustard without processing it, so it’s extra grainy. The brea looks good, with a nice open crumb and crispy crust.

Then it’s just the matter of beef, tomatoes and lettuce, plus some of our pickled shallots on the side.

Delicious! The bread is maybe slightly lighter than the previous versions, and the crust seems a little better than I remember it. The mustard was quite mild, but tasty, and didn’t need making smooth for my liking.

Update: Soph gave the mustard a quick go with the handheld stick blender, and it made the mustard a lot better. It still have big crunchy seeds, but now there’s a thickness to the sauce that was lacking when I had it unprocessed.