Mix Mustard With This Popular Spicy Paste And You'll Want To Put It On Everything

There are a few ingredients that can make every dish they touch sing. A hint of salt, for example, makes everything taste a bit livelier on the tongue, and helps flavors come together in a supremely pleasing way. That final flourish of finishing salt just makes everything taste better than the sum of its parts. As ironclad a condiment as mustard can be in a similar way, it tends to be rather single-note. So, hang onto your hat, gochujang is here to help you really cut the mustard.  

Mix gochujang with mustard, like Dijon or a sweet honey mustard, to create a fresh condiment mash-up that lends an entirely new depth of flavor to just about any dish. If you haven't seen it on restaurant menus as of late, you might be wondering what gochujang is. At its most basic, gochujang is a fermented chili paste that hails from Korea. The lengthy fermentation process required to make it, and ingredients such as rice, soybeans, yeast, salt, and miso paste, deliver an unbelievably complex taste sensation. Rather than hitting hard with spice, thick, vermilion gochujang delivers sweetness, saltiness, and a hint of umami, too. When mixed with mustard, the underlying piquant notes remain, but the overall flavor becomes more punchy and round. 

Gochujang has been cropping up as a power play to amp up sauces ranging from tomato sauce to Alfredo sauce, but the mustard angle makes the combined spicy and tangy elements really shine. For every tablespoon of gochujang, combine with a tablespoon of mustard. 

Dijon mustard works well, but yellow mustard will also do the job. Feel free to play around with the flavors to suit your tastes, adding a teaspoon or two of honey for sweetness or sesame oil for toasty notes. Fried chicken is a particularly welcome landing spot for this craveable coating. Whether dousing french fries, slathering it on hamburger buns, creating a base for memorable salad dressings, or layering it in your next club sandwich, this mustard gochujang mix is so tasty you may want to make enough to bottle it and keep a stash in the fridge.

A dollop on a charcuterie plate as a bit of relief to soft, palate-coating cheeses? Yes, please. Tried and true favorites like a Cuban sandwich or grilled cheese instantly become fresh again. You can even swirl it into the marinade for pulled pork for an unmistakable, but hard to identify, hit of spicy sweetness. You've been warned. You may start going through this mustard gochujang condiment faster than you go through ketchup.