When summer is peaking and the mushroom gods bless the woods with rain, there’s a few tried and true recipes that don’t need any embellishment or re-interpretation. WIld mushrooms bordelaise, and wild mushrooms persillade are the two best examples I know of. When we get into historical-type preparations, you start digging into minutia. Basically what…
Appetizers
Steamed Hericium with Fried Herbs and Drawn Butter
If you hunt wild mushrooms, you probably know some of the flavor comparisons for well known species. Chicken of the woods taste like chicken, chanterelles smell like apricots, slippery jacks taste like viscous slugs (fresh at least), candy caps taste like maple syrup and hericium mushrooms cook a bit like crab (note that I said…
Warm Pickled Chanterelles with Brie, Sourdough and Wild Greens
I’ve mentioned a number of times about the benefits of my low acid mushroom conserve recipe. It’s easy to think of pickled chanterelles and other mushrooms purely as something to eat cold of out a jar, but that’s not why I pickle them. I preserve mushrooms in acidic liquid since it’s the best way to…
Milkweed Flower Cordial
Nothing says summer to me grabbing a big handful of milkweed flowers and taking a whiff. The smell is so sweet, so floral, but at the same time, it’s not cloying at all. It’s just deep, dark and so sweet. If I close my eyes while I smell my mind drifts to the things that…
Spiced Nuts with Maple and Rosemary
I’ve been working as a consultant on a new restaurant project: it’s cozy and intimate, but with limited staff and a teeny-tiny kitchen where 3 cooks behind the line seems crowded. One of the first things I started to think about was how to have some extra offerings and things I can cross-utilize on the…
Chilled Melon Curry with Kinome Leaves
I’ve been on a cold soup kick lately at the restaurant. During the Summer, I crave cold and room temperature food. Of course I’ve had tomato gazpacho, but It wasn’t until I tasted Daniel Patterson’s now famous chilled pea soup with buttermilk and nasturtiums that I started to understand the possibilities and thought process of…
Puffball Hummus
My new job is happily devouring my life, so I only managed to engineer *one* new recipe with puffballs this year, but it’s a great one: puffball hummus. Last year I shared a recipe for a caramelized puree of puffballs that allows you to concentrate their flavor and compress them into a small size that’s…
Stuffed Shaggy Parasol Mushrooms
God but I’ve been having fun cooking shaggy parasols. They’re versatile in the kitchen, but like you would expect from most mushrooms, the less you do to them, the better they are. Their caps are wonderfully concave, and just begging to be stuffed with something. The stems are interesting in that they have a different…
Black Trumpet-Peacock Dumplings in Broth, With Sweet Corn and Amaranth
When I was butchering my peacock, I knew that working with the thighs and legs would probably be the easy part. The bird was over four years old so the breasts, even with the skin on would be temper mental and challenging to cook well. Poultry meat from an older bird is going to be…
Hericium Crab Cakes
This is the original lions mane mushroom crab cake recipe you’ve been looking for. It’s one of the most popular mushroom recipes ever on this site. If I get asked for my go-to recipe for Hericium / Lions mane mushrooms, crab cakes are usually the answer. Don’t get me wrong, they’re perfectly good sautéed…
Ricotta-Ramp Tart With Morel Jus
For the first 7 or so years of my kitchen career, I was addicted to cooking Italian food. There’s a mystique about it that seemed to epitomize fancy to me as a kid, so making high cuisine must mean I have to be in an Italian restaurant, right? Now I understand that Italian and French…
Puffball Caviar
Reading Jean Louis Palladin was when I first saw the importance of language in writing a menu. It’s a tangent from our puffball recipe, but my favorite example is how he described cooked testicles to diners. If he knew them, he told them they were sweet breads, if he didn’t know them, he told them…
Wild Mushrooms With Garlic And Parsley
There are some recipes so timeless that they’re known across borders and cultures with the only change being their name. Wild mushrooms with garlic and parsley, or persillade, is one of those dishes. In France, this would be called mushrooms with persillade. In Italian it’s known as mushrooms “la loro morte” roughly “cooked to their…