Chefs’ Choice

Celebrity Chef and actor, Amrita Raichand who shot to fame with the food show Mummy Ka Magic, is from Bihar. She remembers that during her childhood, the delightful flavour and aroma of mustard oil was always wafting from the family kitchen. It was a familiar and homely experience that she grew up with, and later – as a chef – she found various ways to work the dominant taste of mustard oil into her recipes. Amrita believes that the characteristic flavour of this oil should not be seen as a drawback. Instead she uses it to transform the simplest of recipes into something interesting… something different.

Another celebrity from the international gourmet business, Chef Nishant Choubey, has a very experimental approach to using mustard oil. Recognizing the inherent versatility of mustard oil, he uses it to add a completely new dimension to Indonesian and other South East Asian cuisines. In particular, he appreciates the high smoking point (around 250^oC) that mustard oil offers, which means it remains stable even at high temperatures and is ideally suited to recipes that involve extended cooking and repeated reheating across multiple stages. Like Amrita, he uses mustard oil to create dishes that leave your taste-buds tingling with a delightful, spicy sensation.

Yet another celebrity chef who is known to be passionate about using mustard oil is Chef Manjeet Gill. He was instrumental in developing the menu for ITC’s Royal Vega at the Grand Chola in Chennai. The Royal Vega is India’s first super-premium luxury vegetarian restaurant. The menu is based on the tenets of Vedic cooking and incorporates many of the principles found in ancient Ayurveda treatises. In accordance with Chef Gill’s instructions, all cooking in the kitchens of this restaurant are done using only mustard oil and ghee.

As you can see – the leading chefs all across India have a clear choice when it comes to cooking media: they choose mustard oil.

International Chefs talking about Mustard Oil

Chef Ken Oringer had never thought of trying Mustard Oil as an ingredient for any of his recipes till the well-known actor and food writer Madhur Jaffrey visited his restaurant in Boston. He worked with Jaffrey on a few recipes and found – to his delight – that no single ingredient could add as much flavour to a dish as mustard oil. And he soon discovered that many of his American customers too loved the unique taste of this typically Indian cooking oil.

Another American chef, Michael Hodgkins, uses Mustard Oil as his preferred seasoning for everything from salad dressings to fried items. It’s his favourite ingredient even when he’s not making Asian dishes. “It doesn’t coat your mouth”, he says; “You taste it – and then it’s gone!”

Chef Alex Raij has something to say about the heating sensation that mustard oil typically creates. She points out that mustard oil has a delectable heat that does not linger; it’s a flavour that hits the tongue differently and creates a completely different culinary experience.

Laurence Edelman is another American chef who fell in love with Mustard Oil’s “silky heat”. When he discovered this enticing ingredient from exotic India, he initially used it sparingly. But now he uses it quite liberally. He says: “Mustard oil has a clang – once you get a taste of it, all of a sudden everything is lacking mustard oil.”

The very idea of American chefs using mustard oil is strange because in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has banned the use of mustard oil as a foodstuff. The packs must be labelled ‘For External Use Only’. There is no basis for this. In fact, scientists at the Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health say that there is absolutely no evidence of mustard oil being harmful for human beings.

Here’s a funny twist in the tale: Jean-Georges Vongerichten, another American chef, says that he specifically looks for the ‘External Use Only’ label when he goes shopping for Mustard Oil. He says it signals that it’s the “real stuff”.