Easy Fish Fillets in a Traditional Mustard Sauce

The mustard fish recipe looked like a sure thing. Grind some mustard seeds and a dried chili together and mix with water. Make a paste with turmeric, cayenne, and water. Rub the fish fillets with turmeric, salt, and mustard oil and let them sit for 10 minutes. Prepare some panch phoran and hot chilies for the final cooking. While the fish are broiling, the sauce is prepared by heating mustard oil, then adding the panch phoron. When the mustard seeds in that begin to pop, stir in the turmeric paste and some extra water. Then stir in the mustard paste. Bring to a boil, add salt and the chilies, stir, and remove from the heat. Pour the sauce over the fish, then simmer for two minutes. Serve.

Sounds good. Made a pretty plate. First bite”yuck! Unpleasantly strong taste of mustard. The recipe says to stir the ground mustard-chili into water and let the seeds settle. But the seeds never settled. Even after half an hour, the mixture remained uniformly grainy in texture with no settling apparent. Maybe I ground the seeds too fine, although they looked coarse to me. Or maybe the recipe meant 4 teaspoons of mustard seeds, rather than 4 tablespoons. At any rate, we both scraped off as much of the sauce as we could, then mixed the fish with the rice. This was reasonably good.