Who doesn’t love mustard? A hot dog is not a hot dog without it.
It can be fancy or an everyday variety, from the tried-and-true yellow mustard to culinary versions such as the rhubarb mostarda on the pork chop at Hemenway’s Seafood Grill & Oyster Bar in Providence.
Believe it or not, there is a National Mustard Museum. What may not be as much of a surprise is there is a World-Wide Mustard Competition, which consists of three rounds.
The third round was held on April 8 at cities across the United States, including Philadelphia, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, New York City, Boston and at the museum itself in Middleton, Wis. Approximately 75 judges spread across those locations ranked mustards in 18 different categories. Winners will be selected in May and their mustard will be displayed at the museum.
One of the mustards already proudly displayed there is Dotterer’s, a gourmet variety that came from Newport. Yes, mustard has been made in Rhode Island, as it has in all 50 states.
[caption id="attachment_493587" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]
A CUT ABOVE: A crowd gathers outside the National Mustard Museum in Middleton, Wis., which recently held the World-Wide Mustard Competition, where Boston served as a judging site. Winners will be selected in May.
COURTESY NATIONAL MUSTARD MUSEUM[/caption]
Ken Zuckerman, a member of the museum’s board of directors, did an interview for my radio broadcast and podcast recently at the New England Restaurant & Bar Show, which was held at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center from March 30-31.
Zuckerman, an executive in the food industry in the Boston area, said he became interested in mustard through his work. His story began with a New England connection.
The National Mustard Museum was conceived and founded by Barry Levenson, a former assistant attorney general of Wisconsin, centered around a mustard collection he began in 1986 while despondent over the failure of the Boston Red Sox to win the World Series that year.
“We’ve been running the World-Wide Mustard Competition since the early ’90s,” Zuckerman said. “Its predecessor was the Napa Valley Mustard Competition. They started it. The mustard museum kind of knew more about mustard than they really did out in Napa Valley based on the fact that at that time, we probably had about 4,000 mustards in our collection. Today, our collection just surpasses 7,000 mustards.”
Chef Chris Thompson, proprietor of Blackstrap BBQ in Winthrop, Mass., was one of the judges for the competition and shared some of the ballot criteria. Categories ranged from mild and American style (yellow) to Dijon and hot, including exotic mustard, mustard made from fruit and, of course, honey mustard.
Zuckerman explained some of the differentiators.
“Pungency is very, very important because there are secondary additions to mustard that can make them even spicier than the mustard itself,” he said.
Pepper mustard is the fastest-growing segment of the mustard world, which parallels the continued popularity of hot sauces. When we go to the grocery store, there are seemingly new hot sauces every week. More and more peppers are being cultivated, some of which are combined into mustard.
“When you taste the mustard, the mustard flavor must be the most prominent,” Zuckerman said, giving an example of a garlic mustard. “It’s very, very easy for a garlic mustard to have the garlic totally overpower the mustard. So, when we define the category, we want it to be mustard first and then the kind of additional additives second in the equation. It must taste like mustard.”
Twenty mustard entrants per category were narrowed down to the top three, a gold medalist, a silver medalist and a bronze medalist. A grand champion will be determined from the 18 gold medalist winners.
The National Mustard Museum is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and has an all-volunteer board and all-volunteer staff. For more information, visit www.mustardmuseum.org. And if you want to plan a museum visit, National Mustard Day is Aug. 2.
“Dining Out With Bruce Newbury,” syndicated weekly on radio, is heard in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont and Indiana. Contact Bruce at bruce@brucenewbury.com.
