Category Archives: Fungi

Turkey & Chanterelle Meatloaf

MUSHROOMS ARE COMFORT food—and what’s more comfortable than meatloaf goosed with mushrooms? We use our frozen stash of chanterelles for this recipe. A 12-oz packet of last fall’s haul adds a woodsy, even fruity note to the ‘loaf that you just can’t get from supermarket buttons. And the great thing about meatloaf for dinner? You’ve got unbeatable sammies for lunch the next day.

1 large onion, finely chopped
1 tbsp garlic, minced
1 tbsp olive oil
1 medium carrot, diced
1 lb fresh chanterelle mushrooms (or 1/2 lb of previously cooked and frozen), chopped
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
2 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1/3 cup fresh parsley, finely chopped
5 tbsp tablespoon ketchup
1 cup fine fresh bread crumbs (two bread slices)
1/3 cup milk
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 lb ground turkey

Saute onion and garlic over moderate heat, stirring, until onion is softened, about 2 minutes. Add carrot and cook, stirring, until softened, about 3 minutes. Add mushrooms, salt, and pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until liquid mushrooms give off is evaporated and they are very tender, 10 to 15 minutes. Stir in Worcestershire sauce, parsley, and 3 tablespoons ketchup, then transfer vegetables to a large bowl and cool.

Stir together bread crumbs and milk in a small bowl and let stand 5 minutes. Stir in eggs, then add to vegetables. Add turkey to vegetable mixture and mix well with your hands. Mixture will be very moist. [We use Diestel ground turkey, which comes in convenient 1-lb cylinders that can be easily frozen.]

Form into 9- by 5-inch oval loaf in a lightly oiled baking pan and brush meatloaf evenly with remaining 2 tablespoons of ketchup. Bake until meatloaf interior registers 170°F, 50 to 55 minutes.

Let meatloaf stand 5 minutes before serving.

Urban Foraging, Scene 1


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.

Eureka!


The truffle game is a steep learning curve. I made scouting missions here and here earlier this winter. Then I joined a few other rookies to go here. All three forays proved skunks. Last Friday I had the good fortune to meet a pair of would-be truffle hunters at the Survivor’s Banquet. L. and P., it turned out, lived on a Christmas tree farm in the Cascade foothills. Barely able to contain myself, I told them how truffle hunters down in Oregon were known to target such habitats. We made a date.

Yesterday I met another hopeful truffler, W., just off the highway and we proceeded to L. and P.’s home up the road. Huge century-old stumps decorated the property. Rows of Christmas trees dotted the meadows and older stands of mostly Douglas-fir filled out the remainder of the acreage. A steady rain swelled the five creeks that tumbled down off the ridge and gurgled across the property, one of which drove a Pelton wheel that powered the place. Piles of fresh elk droppings waited for an errant footfall. It was a magical setting to be sure.

Armed with potato rakes, we visited stand after stand without luck, guided by S., a cheerful 75-year-old local logger. We walked and raked, walked and raked. All the while the rain came down and runneled off our hoods. Truffles, it seemed, would continue to elude me. After lunch S. suggested we visit another timber stand he had worked on down the road. The trees here were about the same age class—20 to 30 years old—but they were packed in tighter, with less light filtering through, and hence, less undergrowth. S. grumbled about the poor thinning practices in this dense stand while the rest of us oohed and ahhed at what seemed like perfect truffle habitat: young Doug-firs, sparse groundcover, and a deep, loose duff composition.

L. struck paydirt first. She followed a vole hole with her rake and came away with a gumball-sized nugget. We all took a whiff. Yowza! Talk about a fecund, gnarly aroma. It smelled of overripe fruit and other more lusty odors. W. found a couple wormy ones past their prime, and then I unearthed a large, double-nobbed specimen. This one, though, lacked the pungent aroma of the first. I sliced it open. The marbling and soft, cheese-like interior gave it the textbook appearance of an Oregon black truffle, Leucangium carthusianum.

I am a truffle virgin no more.

To be honest, though, I think we’re late in the season for Oregon blacks. We were actually hoping to find the Oregon spring white truffle, Tuber gibbosum. These critters look to be a tad long in the tooth. One of my fellow mycophagists over at the Cascade Mycological Society‘s forum has suggested that these specimens exhibit evidence of frost damage, based on the dark marbling.

So now I’m waiting to see if the big one develops an aroma. I’ve got it wrapped in a paper napkin and sealed in a Ziplock in the fridge. I’ll know if it ripens because the whole kitchen will start to smell. More likely, my truffle is indeed frost-burned and will rot instead. That’s okay. Even if I don’t get to cook with it, I’m relieved to be off the schneid.

Beef Burgundy with Porcini and Chanterelles

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


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

The Hunt Begins


Yesterday I made my first scouting mission in search of truffles. No, not overpriced chocolates but those even more costly tuberous gems so prized in Europe for their culinary alchemy, the sort found mostly in gourmet food shops and fancy restaurants that, at peak ripeness, can smell like “a dirty whore” and drive epicures to madness.

Commonly gumball-sized, truffles are fungi that fruit beneath the soil in association with particular trees. The world’s most famous truffles are the Perigord (or black) truffle of France and the Alba (or white) truffle of Italy. Black truffles have been described as fruity and spicy, with deep scents of chocolate, coffee, and other earthy flavors. White truffles are renowned for their overpowering aroma (the word “funky” comes to mind). When properly ripe, it only takes a small shaving of truffle to flavor a dish with a pungent kick of the earth. They’re shaved over pasta, meats, and even mashed potatoes.

Only recently has the Pacific Northwest been recognized as a suitable place to harvest truffles, if not in the same rarified realm as France and Italy. Some chefs, notably James Beard, have suggested that our native truffles are just as kitchen-worthy as European truffles, but because the truffle culture here is young and inexperienced, wild truffles sold to market and on to restaurants and consumers are sometimes of dubious quality, either under-ripe or past their prime. This has hurt the culinary reputation of what are collectively known as “Oregon truffles.”

Anyway, I once again find myself in a familiar fungal spot. Mushrooming and truffling are secretive pursuits, and rarely will someone give away information for free. You can spend all day researching on the Internet and have no clearer idea where to go than when you started; the public library is near useless. Even joining a mycological society can only get you so far. The bottom line is boots-on-the-ground trial and error. I have to remind myself that I learned how to find chanterelles, then morels, and both spring and fall king boletes. Each species was like starting over. This detective work is part of the fun, though, so I’m looking forward to my first truffle discovery. (Don’t hold your breath!)

As for yesterday: It was a nice walk in the woods, but I never found the right forest conditions. Being a rare sunny winter day, I did get a nice photo of a sun-spotted clump of moss.