Mustard Oil

Drawn cold from the year’s first mustard, before heat can rob the oil of its pungency. The colour is amber and almost solid in winter — both are signs the press did its work right.

Sarson ka tel is the oil that defines Bengali and North Indian kitchens. It is also the oil most likely to be adulterated on the open market, blended with argemone or refined seed oils that compromise the very flavour it is bought for. We have refused this since the press began in 1965. What goes into the ghaani is mustard seed. What comes out is mustard oil. Nothing else.

The pungency is the test. Heat the oil to its first smoke before the tadka — kachi ghani asks for this — and the sharpness softens into the round, nutty depth that finishes a dal, a fish curry, or a winter achaar. If the oil does not bite at first, it has been refined out.

In Bengali and Punjabi kitchens, mustard oil is also the oil of celebration. The first drop of fish into a smoking kadhai, the slow finish on a katoris of aam ka achaar, the rub on a winter morning before a bath — sarson has always been more than a cooking oil. It is part of the household’s grammar.

What to expect from the bottle

Bharat mustard oil clouds in the cold. If you put a bottle in the refrigerator, the next morning it will be thick, amber, partly solid. This is the natural waxes and long-chain fatty acids in the oil — compounds with a higher melting point than the rest. Refined oils are put through winterisation precisely to strip these out, so they stay clear on a supermarket shelf. We do not winterise. The cloudiness is the proof that nothing has been removed.

Bring the bottle back to room temperature and the oil returns to clear amber. Pungency, flavour, behaviour in the kadhai — all unchanged. The fridge test is, in fact, one of four household checks for purity. We wrote up the others in the argemone adulteration guide.