I have a few different mushroom compound butters on this website, but shaggy mane ink butter is different. If you’re unfamiliar, shaggy manes / Coprinus comatus (also known as lawyer’s wig mushrooms or shaggy inkcaps) turn into an inky black substance as they mature. The transformation from mushroom to goo might look unappetizing, but it’s…
Condiments
Ramp Leaf Soy Sauce
Soy sauce makes just about everything taste better, and there’s a lot of options to pick from. There’s aged soy sauce, shoyu and tamari, for starters, and then, pertaining to this post, there’s flavored soys. You can add soy sauce infused with ramp or wild onion leaves to the list. Before I made this, the…
Onions Pickled in Wild Fruit Vinegar
With only two ingredients (if you don’t include salt and pepper), onions pickled in wild fruit vinegar is officially the easiest recipe I’ve ever put up here. There’s typically something like this in one form or another in my fridge or on the counter, and they’re the perfect accent for a lot of different dishes,…
Fermented Knotweed Relish
A few years ago I shared my now favorite recipe for fermented Japanese Knotweed I got from my friend Jacqui, who lives in France. You take the knotweed, peel it, and ferment it in brine. The fermentation seems to denature the mucilage (slimy quality) a bit, with the natural acid produced from lacto-fermentation bringing a…
Balsamic Blue Cheese Sauce for Venison, Game and Vegetables
Chocolatey and thick, shimmering with sugar, fat and funk, Balsamic-Blue Cheese sauce is one of the great sauces in my secret stash I bring out occasionally. I learned the sauce working under chef William Salvadore from Milan, and it was love at first spoonful. The restaurant he owned was an Italian-inspired American steakhouse concept, and…
Dried Mushroom Chili Crisp
Dried mushroom chili crisp has been on near constant rotation in my lineup of favorite condiments for a couple years now, and, also happens to be the only recipe including mushrooms in my book (it was really hard to separate my culinary loves and write a book on plants, vegetables, nuts and starches, but it…
Wild Plum Ketchup
Wild plums are in season right now in the Midwest, and this is one of the best things I’ve made with them to date. Seven years ago, I put up a recipe for ketchup made from wild plums (Prunus americana or nigra will both work, as well as any common plum or stone fruit you…
Ultimate Berry Vinegar
Growing up in the restaurant industry in the Early 2000’s, I was witness to some of the great culinary cliches of our time, many of them born in the 1990’s from what I can gather. Honestly, there’s too many to count, and I’m guilty of a few myself, like stacking food a la Alfred Portale….
