This Is The Worst Yellow Mustard You Can Buy At The Grocery Store
At summer BBQs in the park or your backyard, having the right condiments for your hot dogs and hamburgers is key. Mustard may be the most important topping for any meat coming off of the barbecue and into a bun. For many regional sausages, like the Chicago-style hot dog, yellow mustard is a necessity. So, can you run to the store and just grab any yellow mustard and expect to still have friends after your gathering? Not so fast. We recently had our reviewer taste and rank 14 different mustards, and they found one that clearly wasn't worth using: Price Rite's Yellow Mustard.
Our reviewer used their 15 years of food-industry experience and rated each mustard on taste and texture. They tasted the mustards without further additions, so an especially flavorful sausage wouldn't skew the results. Among the 14 brands tested, Price Rite offers only a yellow mustard, so, while other brands got multiple shots at a good score, this store-brand lived and died off its plain variety. While the texture of Price Rite's mustard was fine, the flavor tasted watered down. Our reviewer said it had half the taste of a classic like French's. Price Rite's mustard contained no zing, no zip, and certainly no kick.
Where did Price Rite's mustard go wrong?
It doesn't matter that the price is right if the flavor is wrong. If you make the mistake of storing a good, flavorful mustard in the pantry instead of the refrigerator, perhaps Price Rite's meagerly spiced version is what you end up with. If you shop at Price Rite and compare the store brand mustard to French's Classic Yellow Mustard (which came in first in our ranking), right away you'll notice a difference in price. At Price Rite, French's is $1.99 for a 20 ounce bottle, which is around $0.10 an ounce, while Price Rite's is $0.79 for 14 ounces, or around $0.05 an ounce. Don't waste your money — this price is a trap to get you topping your hot dog with flavorless yellow paste. For half the price, you get half the flavor. Our reviewer said they would never buy this mustard again, nor would they ever suggest it to anyone. If Cousin Ritchie in The Bear would never put ketchup on a hot dog, I'd imagine he'd be even more upset with water-flavored mustard on one.
The ingredients between Price Rite and French's are slightly different, with French's adding "#1 grade mustard seed," additional unnamed spices, garlic powder, and natural flavor. A lot of different factors go into grading mustard seeds, although most mustards use #1 grade, even if they don't specify. Most likely, it is the added spice and natural flavor that is giving French's more zing than Price Rite.