Amp up your summer salad dressing with toasted mustard seeds

by Monika Bartyzel, Posted Jul 14th 2008 @ 4:03PM

As a bit of a veggie fiend, I eat a lot of salads. While I rarely change up the ingredients in the salad mix, I sometimes like to change up the dressing, because the same ol' vinaigrette or caesar dressing can get old after a while. One of the best and easiest flairs that I've found for salad dressing is mustard seeds.

After toasting them on a skillet, you just grind them up, like you see above, and add them into your dressing. The ground mustard seeds give a smoky depth to the dressing and brings a great added flavor to the dish. The seeds above were used as part of a great Mustard Seed Dressing recipe that I picked out of The Big Book of Backyard Cooking, and you can check it out after the jump.

Mustard Seed Dressing

Ingredients:

1 1/2 tsp mustard seeds
1 1/2 tbsp cider vinegar
3 1/2 tsp fresh lemon juice
1 1/4 tsp Kosher salt
3/4 tsp Dijon mustard
1/3 cup canola oil
Freshly ground black pepper

Heat a skillet over medium heat until hot, then reduce heat to low and add mustard seeds. Toast them, shaking occasionally, until they darken to gray and pop in 4-5 minutes.
They say to cool the seeds, put in a self-sealing bag and crush with a rolling pin or meat pounder. I just used a mortar and pestle right after cooking.
In a small bowl, whisk together vinegar, lemon juice, salt, mustard, and several grinds of black pepper. Slowly whisk in the oil, then add crushed mustard seeds.

Filed Under: Ingredients
Tags: dijon, mustard seed, MustardSeed, salad, salad dressing, SaladDressing, salads, soup