Since Jesse and I met in 1999, we’ve had a dream of having our own food
company someday. We have dabbled in home brewing, sausage making,
Kombucha brewing, pickling of all sorts and many other fun and exciting
kitchen projects.
In 2001, we traveled to England, Scotland and Ireland and became
enthralled with the mustard we found on nearly every pub table we
visited. Most of the pubs served standard pub fare, but there always
seemed to be a house-made mustard like nothing we had ever
tasted in the US to accompany the food.
Jesse traveled to Germany for work conferences in 2006. Each time he
returned, he would bring home various jars of mustard for sampling.
Again, we found that there were no comparable products locally. This
inspired Jesse to embark on his own mustard making journey.
The road was long and the lessons were tough. Jesse read books and
researched on the Internet. He found that mustard makers like to keep
their recipes very secret. Each time he followed a recipe, he was
disappointed with the result. This led to 10 years of trial and error.
Taking notes and altering his recipe ever so slightly, he labeled test
batches carefully in the fridge, waited for them to settle, tried heat,
tried soaking, tried no heat and tried standing on his head while
chewing bubble gum. We tasted some doozy batches before he stumbled
across something truly special. We moved from Portland to the sticks in
2016, bought an acre of land with a barn and decided to build a kitchen
and begin solidifying our dream. It was here that Jesse discovered one
of the best kept mustard secrets ever!
To be continued…
