Seven steps. One press. No heat, no solvent, no middleman between our field and your kitchen.
If you've read our piece on the 100-acre khapli plot, you've already seen half of this story. Yellow mustard grows in the rows beside the khapli at Ekant Farms — the two staples we lead with are quite literally raised side by side. The wheat tempers the soil, the mustard fixes the nitrogen, and the rotation rebuilds what fifty years of monoculture has thinned out.
Once the harvest is in, the work begins again. Here is how a mustard seed becomes a bottle of oil on our farm — step by honest step.
The seven steps
01. Heritage yellow mustard seed. We grow Brassica seed lineage that's been multiplied on our farm year-on-year. No hybrid varieties bred for industrial extraction yield. The flowers come in mid-February — yellow waves between the standing khapli.
02. Sowing & intercropping. Mustard is sown in late October, often in alternating rows or borders with khapli. Different root depths, different nutrient draws, mutually protective against pests. No synthetic fertilizer, no pesticide.
03. Hand-paced harvest. Late March, after the pods have dried on the stem to the colour of straw. We watch the pods, not the calendar — too early and the seed isn't oil-rich; too late and the pods shatter on touch.
04. Threshing & cleaning. Pods are threshed and the seed is winnowed in the traditional way: a slow stream poured against the wind, separating chaff from grain. Then a second pass through a mechanical screen to remove dust and stones.
05. The wood-press (kachi ghani). Seed is loaded into a wooden ghani — a slow-rotating cold press that crushes the oil out at room temperature. No heat is applied at any stage. The process takes hours per batch instead of the minutes a hot industrial press would.
06. Natural settling. The fresh-pressed oil rests in steel tanks for 5–7 days. Solids settle naturally to the bottom. No bleaching agents. No filter aids. What rises clear is the oil you'll cook with.
07. Glass-bottle packaging. Decanted into food-grade glass, sealed within days of pressing, batch-stamped with the press date and the field plot. We use glass because plastic eats aroma, and aroma is most of what makes this oil what it is.
The seed never leaves the farm before it becomes oil. The oil never leaves the farm before it becomes a bottle.
What we don't do
- No solvent extraction. Industrial mustard oil is bathed in hexane to squeeze out the last drops. We don't.
- No high-heat processing. Cold-press temperatures stay under 40°C. Industrial expellers run at 90–120°C.
- No refining, no bleaching, no deodorising. These steps destroy the omega-3s, the pungency, and the colour. The pungency isn't a flaw — it's antimicrobial; it's what makes the oil preserve pickles for years.
- No blending. Some “cold-pressed” brands mix refined oil into the bottle to lower cost. We don't.
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