LissEllas mustard from Dalarna

Our history

I love mustard. Jar after jar was bought and eaten. But I never found any mustard that really tasted mustard.
The idea came. Why not make my own mustard? I searched my way through making thousands of versions. All along the line from early childhood I´ve loved to play with different taste combinations. Inspired from my grandmother who I grow up with. She cooked, made sausages, preservations, baked... all based on old traditions, great skill and joy. Her mother, my great grandmother, was a famous smoker working in atraditional sauna smoking meat and sausages on the farm where we now live outside of Garpenberg.
As a child everything was allowed for me to mix home in the kitchen. There were two rules. Make little and clean up after you. I mixed all wild and examined. The rest of the family who often was sitting in front of the TV was my test panel. Best was to look at their faces because words could sometimes be a bit to polite. The joy of creating new taste combinations is something that has followed through my life.
On the side from his ordinary work, as a teacher in environment and sustainability at the swedish agriculture university, Olle started 1995 to make small tiny batches of christmasmustard after my recipe that he sold at some christmasmarkets. Honey from our own ecological bee hives became an important ingredient, but today we buy at the honey because Olle became seriously allergic to bees.

It turned out that almost all mustard seeds are imported to Sweden. Moreover it was very difficult to find mustard seeds with really good taste and ecologically grown mustard seeds were scares. The idea with locally grown ecological mustard seeds took form. We tasted different variants and tested to grow the most interesting ones at the end of the 90s to investigate how they would turn out in our climate and the soil here in southern Dalarna. Since then we have organic certified mustard seed locally produced here in Dalarna as the base in our production. The joy to create and taste were our lead-stars. Lots of things were tested. The mustard reached out to our customers through the markets Olle attended and eventually to some enthusiastic stores.

2008 we discovered the there was a world wide competition for mustard in USA. We became surprised and happy, when it after long jury tastings was clear that we had won four medals. Today after many years of competing our products have conquered unbelievable 39 medals.
Olle left his work with environmental courses 2010 and became a full-time mustard maker.He is the one, together with some great co-workers, that the carry the work with our artisan mustard on a daily bases. At that time the production also moved into new well equipped facilities. To our great pleasure all energy for that place is produced by windmills standing on the mountains nearby Garpenberg.

The corner stone for LissEllas is taste and treat. They always stand first. Mustard recipes are developed through playing and tasting in an ever going process.
It starts with a need, a longing and often with a complete image of how it should taste in me.
Then it’s time to make the idea into a real mustard, with the right texture and different levels of taste. An important aid is the huge yellow mustard mill that stands in its own room. There it can roar and make all the dust it wants, while grinding the mustard into all the different fractions we need for our products. If we don’t find the raw material that gives the qualities I want we keep on searching. That’s why our products are not all ecological. If we don’t find what we want locally or in Sweden, we look further. So we use whisky from different distillery’s, sugar from different places on earth and some mustard from other places to achieve the taste we want. It took us for instance ten years of intense searching to find the vinegar that we use today, without sulfur which was a definite request from us. The taste goes first philosophy counts for everything like berries, beer, salt etc.

Our wish is to make good, have fun and of course make products that touches and awaken sounds of joy within the ones eating them. Today we have around forty different products. Why so many some ask. Well, simply to cover all different needs that arouse over the years. They are all very different. All are made individually, with their own character and their own sphere of taste. The mustards are the canvas that I use my rich palette to create on.

- And you, I hope that you will find some of our mustards that might make you happy!

LissElla