Cherry Mostarda

5/5 - (1 vote)
Cherry MOstarda with goat cheese
Wow! Cherry Mostarda is really good!

It’s cherry season, and, while we love fresh cherries, we also like to see what we can make from them. Sure, there’s a lot of desserts made with cherries, but what about something savory? Today, we decided that we’d try making some cherry mostarda. Now, we don’t know about you, but we’ve never even tasted this Italian condiment, so we figured we’d scratch up a small batch for testing purposes. Sound interesting? We’ll show you what we did.

First, we looked for a recipe on the Internet. You can find them, a lot of them, and, hey, they’re all different. But, they’re also all the same. While different, they’re all basically a sweet and sour fruit chutney with mustard, so they have fruit, sugar, vinegar, spices, and mustard, which is added after cooking. Heck, we can make that. So, we started with one, added a few ideas from another, incorporated some of our own ideas from prior chutney-making events, and, poof, we have our Scratchin’ It Cherry Mostarda recipe.

Cherry Mostarda

Servings: 1 cup
Author: Shawn

Ingredients

  • 1/2 pound fresh cherries pitted and halved
  • 2 Tbs dried Montmorency cherries
  • 1/2 Tbs yellow mustard seeds
  • 1/2 Tbs brown mustard seeds
  • 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
  • 2 Tbs brown sugar
  • 2-3 Tbs red wine vinegar
  • 2 Tbs wine
  • 1/4 tsp kosher salt
  • 1/4 tsp freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1- inch piece cinnamon stick
  • 1 Tbs coarse-grain mustard

Instructions

  • In a medium saucepan, combine all ingredients except the coarse-grain mustard. Place over medium heat and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer, and cook, stirring occasionally, until most liquid is absorbed, about 1 hour.
  • Remove from heat, discard bay leaf and cinnamon stick, and stir in coarse-grain mustard. Let cool completely.
  • Pack in a small container and refrigerate.

Ingredient discussion:

Looking at various recipes, it became clear that you can use pretty much any spices that you might like, so feel free to add more or less, depending on your tastes and what you have on hand. If you decide to add things such as cloves or peppercorns or allspice berries, place them in a small sachet made of muslin so you can retrieve them easily later. We do recommend that you keep the mustard seeds, of course. It seems as if it might be hard to have mostarda without mustard seeds.

Procedure in detail:

making cherry mostarda
You might not think these ingredients will make something delicious, but they do.
making cherry mostarda
There’s enough liquid that you don’t need to watch it while simmering; just check it every 15 minutes and give it a stir.

Combine and cook. This is a great recipe, since all you need to do is mix together most the ingredients and cook. So, put everything except the coarse-grain mustard into a saucepan and set it over medium heat. Once boiling, reduce the heat to a simmer and cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until most liquid has evaporated, about 1 hour.

Remove from heat. Take the pan off the heat, pick out the bay leaf and the cinnamon stick, and discard. If you’ve added cloves or peppercorns, or anything else you don’t want to crunch down on, remove those now, too.

adding mustard
Naturally, we used our own scratched mustard, but any good mustard will be fine.

Add mustard. Stir in the coarse-grain mustard, taste, and add salt as needed.

Pack. Once cool, pack in a clean container and refrigerate.

As soon as this was done, we had a lunch that included some small rolls, fresh goat cheese, and Cherry Mostarda. Man, o, man, was it good! It’s sweet, but a bit tart, and has a little kick of spice from the cayenne pepper and mustard. Plus, it’s so easy to make. It goes well with savories, such as cheese, but we also think it would be great with a piece of toasted Pound Cake and some Mascarpone. This is an easy five stars, and we sure wish we’d made more to begin with.

Worth the trouble?

2 Replies to “Cherry Mostarda”

  1. We have a beautiful Montmorency Cherry tree & we eat much more savory than sweet. I have made several mostardas from other fruits (all good!) but this one is THE BOMB!!! I ended up making 64 oz over the course of our harvest. Thanks for this FABULOUS recipe!!

    1. We are so glad you like the recipe, we happen to think it’s really good too. Every time we make it, we are surprised how well mustard and fruit go together to make something great.

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