Category Archives: boletes

The Admiral

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The admirable bolete, aka “Admiral” (Boletus mirabilis), is one of my favorites, for its beauty, its lively flavor, and its fleeting collectabilty. Rarely do I find one before the bugs.

Unlike the king bolete (Boletus edulis), which can be used in all manner of culinary ways, the admiral is probably best by itself, sliced and sauteed, an amuse bouche for the table. The taste of lemon is distinctive and usually requires something to balance it such as butter or soy sauce. That said, I’m told the lemony flavor is produced by a compound in the velvety “skin” of the mushroom’s pileus, or cap. Presumably one could peel this off and then use the admiral in any standard porcini recipe.

The admiral is a mushroom of damp Pacific Northwest forests. I generally find it in older hemlock stands with spongy moss carpets where it likes to fruit off nurse logs, and though it can get quite large, with a cap approaching the size of a salad plate, edible specimens are usually smaller.

Now that’s antipasti!

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In the continuing saga of the Great Frozen Porcini Investigation, we took a new tack yesterday and eschewed defrosting altogether. Instead, the prime porcini buttons were exhumed from their chilly hibernation and cast directly into a red-hot skillet in the oven. Talk about going from the ice tray to the toaster.

With a little olive oil to smooth the transition, the porcini baked for 15 minutes by themselves at 400 degrees before the rest of the ingredients joined the party: our first zucchini from the garden, red pepper, and garlic. This colorful assortment roasted in their juices together for another 15 minutes before being turned and showered with fresh thyme and seasoned with salt and pepper. Another fifteen minutes and it was ready: homemade antipasti to go with the wild boar sausage I’d picked up earlier in the day at our local Italian deli.

In all truth, it would take an expert porcini palate to discern these beauties as previously frozen. Tender but not without resiliency, they evinced little of the water-logged sliminess that is characteristic of a defrosted mushroom, and the taste was mildly nutty as one would expect. While my first experiment was not exactly a mandate for freezing porcini buttons, in the future I will definitely assign a few batches of buttons to the cooler if only to have fresh-tasting roasted porcini all year long.

Stay tuned for another experiment soon.

Fettucini with Porcini, Garlic & Parmesan

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I defrosted my first batch of frozen porcini today. As regular readers will recall, just before leaving town for a summer retreat in the Rockies, FOTL took in a haul of fresh spring porcini from the North Cascades, most of it consisting of prime buttons just emerging from the duff. In the past I’ve dried all my excess porcini, but this time I vacuum-sealed and froze the best specimens.

Well, the jury is still mostly out on the freezer technique, but this is what I’ve learned so far. Thawed porcini is nothing like fresh. (No kidding!) I left the mushrooms on paper towels at room temperature. In the picture at left you can see hints of frost on them and even the textured impression of the bag. Almost immediately the porcini started sweating, getting progressively slimier. My hopes were not high. (Next time I might leave them in their sealed bag and defrost overnight in the fridge.)

Despite the puddles of water forming around my precious porcini, they succumbed to the knife rather nicely (though not as crisply as fresh) and the interiors were still happily white for the most part. When it came time to cook the porcini, I decided to raise the heat and saute them longer than I would have otherwise, just to make sure excesss moisture was cooked out and the mushrooms got a crisp edge. This raised a few problems that required kitchen improvisation. The high stove temp meant I needed to de-glaze, so I added a quick pour of vermouth (white wine would have been a better choice); lacking a lemon, I squeezed in some lime for a kick of citrus (again, not optimum). A pat of butter near the end added more opportunity for de-glazing. At this point I added the fettucini to the pan and cut the heat.

The verdict on the first phase of the Great Frozen Porcini Test? Extra cooking helped render the previously frozen porcini into a state that—if not as flavorful—at least superficially resembled the outcome of cooked fresh. Also, because spring porcini is milder than other variants later in the season, I might choose the fall fungi in the future for this subtle dish.

1/8 cup olive oil
2 cups diced porcini
1 tbsp chopped garlic
vermouth
1 tbsp butter
9 oz fresh fettucini
1/4 cup grated parmesan
sprig of fresh thyme, chopped
lemon zest
salt & pepper to taste

Saute porcini in oil until lightly browned; meanwhile add pasta to pot of boiling water. Add garlic to mushrooms and cook another minute or two. De-glaze with white wine or vermouth. Melt in butter, then stir in cooked pasta along with grated parmesan, lemon zest, and spices. Serves 2.

Rocky Mt. Forage

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We’re still on sabbatical in the Colorado Rockies. While the emphasis has been on R&R, a few local forage treats have been duly noted.

We’re still early for the great fruiting of king boletes that graces these mountains in summer, but Ruby found an aspen bolete on one of her flower walks with Mom. These members of the Leccinum genus (known for their scabrous stems) are myccorhizal with—you guessed it—aspen, which we have in good quantities around here. Though traditionally considered fairly choice, there are recent records in Colorado of gastric distress and hospital visits associated with these boletes, and given our remote locale we opted to admire it with eyes only.

As for the plant kingdom, we’re overrun by carrot family umbels (Apiaceae). The family known for striking aromatics such as parsley, fennel, celery, dill, cumin, and so on is a forager’s dream and nightmare—dream for flavor, nightmare for identification. As with certain mushrooms, a nibble on the wrong carrot can be fatal. Just ask Socrates. Poison hemlock is in the carrot family, as is water hemlock. Even choice edibles like cow parsnip come with strings attached, with the particular string in this case being a phototoxin that reacts in ultraviolet light and can cause burning rashes if its juice contacts skin in sunlight.

Speaking of cow parsnip, damp meadows and creek banks are loaded with Heracleum maximum right now. When sliced off below the bulb and peeled, the stem makes an unusual addition to salads and stir-fries, with a complex, almost sweet flavor and a celery-like crunch. As pointed out in an earlier video post, cow parsnip is not for everyone.

A hike along Silver Creek revealed meadows blooming with another umbel, what we think is wild caraway (Carum carvi), or a close relative. In general it’s a good idea to avoid any member of the carrot family unless you’re absolutely sure of the identity, but in this case we were able to rule out the real baddies and felt confident enough to try a taste. The umbels were already fruiting in sunnier spots, and we picked the seed-like fruits and chewed them along the trail. The flavor of licorice was distinctive.

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) has just started to bloom at our elevation in the past week. Yarrow has been used for centuries to make medicinal teas for various ailments, including colds and flues.

Of course, if it’s protein you’re after, the Rockies offer superb big-game hunting in fall and more storied trout streams than an angler can hope to shake a rod at in a lifetime. In the next installment before our return to the PNW, I’ll have footage of local brookie action.

Buttoned Up

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You say you didn’t land any spring kings despite the fisheries biologists’ predictions of a banner year? Me neither. But spring Chinook are not the only kings of the season. The fungal kingdom has its own spring royalty—king boletes—and though the exact species name is up for grabs, we can all agree that what the Italians simply call porcini is out there on the East Slope of the Cascades and Sierra Nevada right now.

I love hunting for spring kings and I love eating them. In Washington these mushrooms seem to be most prevalent around true firs, although experience shows that certain hardwoods can be important too. They start popping as early as April in California and Oregon, but here in Washington I don’t bother checking my patches until June, usually as the morel harvest is waning. Queen’s cup lilies are a good indicator for timing.

Professional foragers grade their mushrooms for market. No. 3’s are the big mature kings that can be spotted even from a speeding car. Also called “flags,” they’re often useful beacons for finding the more desirable no. 2’s and no. 1’s. The former have just emerged from the duff and are still firm, with convex caps and white pores underneath the cap; the latter are harder to see because they’re still in the “button” phase underground, with caps that have just started to open. A trained eye can see the mounded duff that buttons push up, known as “mushrumps” to hungry mycophagists. Hunting for no. 1 buttons is good sport.

Here’s a video that shows the habitat and the progression of looking for spring kings, from flag to button:

While I usually dry my excess boletes for later use in soups and stews, apparently you can freeze the buttons, so this year I’ve vacuum-sealed and frozen about 10 pounds of porcini buttons. I’ll post the results after thawing and cooking the first batch later this summer when the flush is over.

In the meantime, I’ll be eating fresh porcini with morning eggs, sauteed for lunch sandwiches, and prepared in all manner of ways for dinner, from pasta sauces to grilled to stewed. Their meatiness and nutty-woodsy flavor make porcini one of the great treats in all of fungaldom.

Camp Food

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Been out hiking, camping, and enjoying the spring pageantry (ok, so it’s officially summer now, but it’s still spring in the mountains). Oh, and harvesting a bunch of ‘shrooms. The morel flush continues at higher altitudes and the spring king boletes are coming on strong. Meaty mushrooms like morels and porcini make for good eats in camp, transforming a simple dish of rice, romano cheese, and cream into something a little more special.

I’ll have more to say about finding spring porcini in my next post.

The Professional

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My head is still reeling. I got to hang out with a professional forager on Monday. Unfortunately, I can’t divulge much more than that right now, but I’ll say this: my own knowledge could fit in with the dirt and duff under his left pinky nail.

Making your living as a forager is unbelievably hard work. Most professionals—and I use the term loosely—are recent immigrants, legal and otherwise, who are willing to do this seasonal, mercurial, back-breaking work for wages that average out, in most cases, to the minimum. Then there are those who either shun society or want to work in the woods. A very small percentage are making it their daily career and being well compensated. This forager was in the latter category.

Together we scouted some of his spring porcini patches in a casual, day-off sort of way, filling a couple buckets just the same with no. 1 buttons and a bunch of coral to boot. That’s about all I can say for now. I’m writing a piece on our day together and will supply more details at a later date.

Pasta with Porcini in Sage Butter

When I got home I took one of my porcini and chopped it up and sauteed it for a few minutes in sage butter (a couple tbsp of hot melted butter that is just starting to brown, with crispy fried sage leaves), then poured over penne. Garnished with chopped parsley and grated parm. Simple and delicious. Don’t be surprised, though, if your spring porcini is milder than the fall variety.

Urban Foraging, Scene 1

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A quiet morning in residential Seattle. The streets are empty, most everyone is at work. Our hero wanders the sidewalks alone. Suddenly he stops, looks around, decides to knock on a door. He’s wearing his fungi.com ballcap and sunglasses. No one answers. He continues down the block, then thinks better of it. Who will know? Peering around furtively, he steps off the sidewalk and snatches a large mushroom from his neighbor’s front yard. The first birch bolete of the year.

Beef Burgundy with Porcini and Chanterelles

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Recently I picked up a used first edition of Jane Grigson‘s The Mushroom Feast to give me ideas for my large store of wild foraged mushrooms. The book is as much a feast for the eyes and mind as a cookbook, with tasteful line drawings and Grigson’s signature authoritative prose. In fact, I’ve been so in awe of the book that I haven’t cooked a single dish out of it—until last night. My choice: Boeuf a la Bourguignonne, to which I made a couple adjustments, including the addition of dried and reconstituted wild porcini (king boletes) and the substitution of sauteed chanterelles for champignons.

Admittedly, it’s not an easy first recipe to tackle. Beef Burgundy (in the English spelling) is beyond classic; it’s a trip deep into the catalog, when French cooking was the be and all. The Gloucester-born Grigson even gets in a hometown dig in the opening sentence, assuring her readers that the dish “has nothing to do with the watery, stringy mixture served up in British institutions.” Ouch.

The presence of a “bouquet garni” is usually a good indication of just how deep in the catalog you’re spelunking, and as with most versions, Grigson urges her followers to make the preparation a two-day event so that the flavors can properly marry and any excess fat can be allowed to rise to the top where it can be readily skimmed off. (FOTL isn’t worried in the least about fat—excess or not—but he still stuck to the 48-hour sked.)

Before we get to the cooking bit, allow me a quick digression as to why I landed on page 190 of The Mushroom Feast. We had a nearly full bottle of Smoking Loon cabernet in the fridge, which someone had brought over weeks ago during our annual “Hair Shirt” post-New Year dry period. Rather than let it spoil, we popped it in the fridge with the idea of making Drunken Pork.

A few years ago this middling, heavily marketed wine arrived on the racks and was an immediate sensation among some of our friends who don’t really like wine. The vaguely aboriginal label design, lightened by the bird sucking on a big stogie, seemed to suggest a vintage that was approachable. At around $10 it couldn’t be terrible, right? No, just forgettable. The damn bird started making regular appearances at our dinner parties. We finally had to do a wine tasting for some of our friends to show them just how poor a choice it was, how they had been taken in by a marketing machine. For the same price as a bottle of Loon you can get a much more interesting value wine—just go to your local wine shop rather than a supermarket.

A refreshing line in Grigson’s recipe for Beef Burgundy told us we had landed on the right page: “If you use a cheap red wine, rather than a Burgundy, compensate for the thinner flavour by adding a tablespoon of sugar.” It’s hard to imagine Marcella advocating the same work-around for her Pot Roast Amarone. The Loon now had a home.

Ingredients

2-3 pounds of beef chuck, cubed

MARINADE:

3 cups red wine
1/3 cup brandy
1 large onion, sliced
bouquet garni (parsley, sage, bay leaf, rosemary, thyme)
12 peppercorns
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt

SAUCE:

4 tbsp butter
1/2 pound bacon, diced
2 large onions, chopped
several carrots, cut up
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1-3 oz dried porcini, pulverized & rehydrated
2 1/2 tbsp flour
beef or chicken stock (plus leftover porcini stock)
bouquet garni (from marinade)
2 tbsp sugar (optional)
salt and pepper to taste

GARNISH:

1 pound fresh chanterelles (or 1/2 pound frozen dry-sauteed chanterelles)
parsley, minced

1. Cube beef and set aside in marinade for at least six hours.
2. Saute bacon in butter, transfer to large casserole dish with slotted spoon.
3. Remove meat from marinade (save marinade for later), pat dry and brown, then transfer to casserole.
4. Saute onions, carrots, mushrooms and garlic, in turn, then transfer to casserole.
5. Sprinkle flour into pan juices, cook for a moment.
6. Add strained marinade into pan to make smooth sauce.
7. Pour sauce into casserole and add enough stock to cover meat, plus bouquet garni and optional sugar.
8. Cover casserole and cook with low heat in oven or on stove top, 2-3 hours.

The porcini and mushroom stock add an earthy bass note to the usual preparation of Beef Burgundy, while the sweet fruitiness of the chanterelles makes an accompaniment that is more arresting than store-bought button mushrooms. We served the dish over egg noodles to sop up the rich gravy. As Jane Grigson points out in her first sentence of the recipe description, the dish owes little to a traditional beef stew. The meat is “fall off the bone” tender and each bite carries with it a plangent taste of red wine. Speaking of which, a meal like this demands an appropriate pairing. We picked a 2004 Syzygy cabernet sauvignon.

Secret Ingredients

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This post goes out to my dear reader in Augusta, Italy, where the value of “little pigs” is understood.

I’m a fan of secret ingredients—just as long as I’m in on the gig. Secret ingredients can be exotic, hard to find, or, as in this case, curveballs. For two years running now, maybe longer, the Puget Sound Mycological Society‘s annual exhibit has employed a certain chef to whip up countless mushroom dishes for its cooking demonstrations, including a wonderful Cream of Chanterelle Soup. This year I collared the cook during a moment of weakness and extracted the recipe. The secret ingredient that puts this soup over the top is not the nutmeg (although the spice adds an extra dimension for sure) and it’s not the chanterelles, as velvety smooth and sweet as they are (a secret ingredient can’t be the main ingredient, after all). No, the secret ingredient in this chanterelle soup is an entirely different species of mushroom that lifts the soup out of mere excellence and raises it to the sublime: Boletus edulis, the king bolete—known to Italians as porcini, or “little pigs.” The porcini have been dried and aged to concentrate the flavor, then pulverized into dust before being reconstituted in warm water. The resulting wet mush is like a double-shot of the earth itself.

Italians have enjoyed the hearty properties of porcini for centuries. They use them to flavor soups, stews, and sauces with an earthy bass note that cannot be duplicated with any other ingredient, fungal or otherwise. King boletes fruit throughout the temperate regions of the world, although we are fortunate in the American West to have a noteworthy abundance while in traditional European hunting grounds the king, like many other mushroom species (including chanterelles) is increasingly hard to find. Spruce forests in particular are places to look. The largest concentrations of king boletes I’ve ever encountered have been in the montane forests of Colorado. Yesterday’s Cream of Chanterelle Soup was made with king boletes from the North Cascades and chanterelles from Oregon’s Rogue River Canyon. Ideally the chanties should be fresh out of the woods; frozen chanterelles such as these are acceptable provided they’ve been properly stored. The last time I made this soup, for the annual Yakima River Burning Pram, a buxom fly-fisher who called herself Trout Girl took a spoonful and asked me if I was married. Such is the magic of this fairly simple recipe.

Cream of Chanterelle Soup

6 tbsp butter
1 med onion, diced
1 lb fresh chanterelles, diced (frozen dry-sauteed is acceptable; see this post)
1 – 3 oz. dried porcini, rehydrated in 1/2 – 1 cup hot water
1/4 cup flour
4 cups beef stock
1/4 tsp white pepper
1/8 tsp ground nutmeg
salt to taste
1 1/2 – 2 cups heavy cream

1. Melt butter in large pot. Add onions and cook over medium heat until caramelized.
2. Add chanterelles, raise heat, cook 5 minutes, stirring.
3. Pulverize porcini into dust with food processor and rehydrate.
4. Blend in flour with sauteed mushrooms and onions. Add stock slowly. Add porcini mush and any leftover water.
5. Bring to boil, reduce to simmer 5 minutes. Add spices.
6. Lower heat and add cream.

Serves 4 – 6