GET CREATIVE WITH CONDIMENTS

Home cooks experiment with making their own mustard, ketchup and pickles

If you knew how easy it is to make your own sauces and condiments, you’d think twice about buying any.

While there’s a huge range of prepared condiments available — and more hitting the market all the time — many home cooks are discovering how easy it is to whip up their own. See stories inside, and try out some delicious recipes, too.

While there’s a huge range of prepared condiments available — and more hitting the market all the time — many home cooks are discovering how easy it is to whip up their own.

“People are paying close attention to where their ingredients are coming from,” says Toronto chef Corbin Tomaszeski. “They want to have the ability to say, ‘I made this from scratch.’

“I find that once people understand how simple it is to make them on your own they get more and more excited about doing it and then coming up with ... personalized versions.”

From homemade sauces, rubs and marinades with international influences, to relish, mustard, ketchup and pickles, cooks are discovering ways to make their barbecues feel more artisanal.

They’re also prepping condiments for gifts, says grilling expert Steven Raichlen, who suggests possibilities including coffee rub, port mustard, ginger pear chutney, corn relish, mango mint ketchup or bacon bourbon barbecue sauce, which can all be packaged in an attractive jar with a hand-written label.

Novices can easily put together a delicious rub from ingredients they likely have on hand. Raichlen’s basic rub — equal portions of salt, pepper, brown sugar and paprika — is a harmonious formula of sweet, salty, sour and hot, which offers a hit of flavour to pork, beef, chicken and robust fish like salmon.

Tomaszeski likes to include cumin for its aromatic nuttiness and to add a Middle Eastern, South Asian or Mexican influence to his rubs.

“Cumin, oregano, brown sugar, onion, garlic, with a little bit of paprika is a winner every single time. Put in some cracked black pepper. You want to add more heat, put in cayenne,” says Tomaszeski, whose latest venture is Savoury, a private dining room designed to mimic the feel of eating with the chef in his home, which is hidden in the back of the Westin Harbour Castle’s main kitchen.

“You can use it as a rub on your ribs. You can sprinkle it on chicken drumettes. You can sprinkle it on just vegetables on a skewer. It is a beautiful essence that you can add as a rub into the meat to get into the fibres or just as a quick sprinkle.”

Canada cuts the mustard as the second-largest producer in the world and exports more of this valuable crop than any other country. The beloved ballpark staple is made from finely ground yellow mustard seed and turmeric, which adds more depth of colour, along with vinegar and water. But it’s easy to make variations with brown or black seeds crushed or left whole, honey, different vinegars, beer, port, spirits, horseradish or herbs.

That other staple condiment — ketchup — originated in China, not North America, and was imported to the West three centuries ago, says Raichlen, author of the new book “Barbecue Sauces, Rubs and Marinades — Bastes, Butters and Glazes, Too.”

Many chefs and cookbook authors are also experimenting with homemade pickles to add crunch and piquancy to meals in as little as 20 minutes.

British celeb Nigella Lawson confessed to an obsession with “quick pickling” during a Toronto interview to promote her last cookbook, “Simply Nigella.”