Wild mushrooms make fantastic gratins, which is probably evident in that there’s at least 3 separate mushroom gratins on this website. Gratin is a sort of loose word though, and each recipe I’ve put up is very different, since, at the end of the day, the word gratin itself just means baked. Think of gratin…
Wild Mushroom Recipe Archive
Wild mushrooms recipes are the backbone of this site, and what I started writing about years ago. I find it helpful to separate them into the categories of cooking fresh and dried mushrooms and mushroom preserves, so there's links to those below, followed by all of the recipes on this website in post format. Many recipes can be adapted for fresh or dried mushrooms, so think of the titles as a suggestion. Expect some overlap in the organization.
Puffball Parmesan
Besides fried puffballs, a good puff parmesan is a great thing to know how to make, especially in the Midwest where puffballs can be so abundant. It’s pretty simple: take some crisp fried puffballs, layer them in a pan with homemade tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, more tomato, a drizzle of white sauce or bechamel and…
Dried Mushroom Stuffing with Gizzard Confit
On one side of my family there’s often a collaborative effort for Thanksgiving. This year, I’m bringing my favorite dried wild mushroom stuffing, with a few handfuls of turkey gizzard confit for good measure. When I say my favorite stuffing too, I mean it. I’m including some images of the same recipe that go back…
Marinated Honey Mushrooms
I cook honey mushrooms all sorts of ways, but these marinated honeys are the first thing you should make if you’re new to them, or if you’re a honey-harvesting veteran who’s looking for something new tricks. They’re delicious, addicting, the perfect compliment to a charcuterie platter, and work warm or cold. Most of us are…
Carpaccio with Beefsteak Mushrooms
Carpaccio, the classic Italian appetizer of tenderized, thinly sliced raw beef served with olive oil, arugula and good parmesan, was one of the first recipes I was taught to prep when I worked for Chef Angelo Volpicelli, the first teacher I can credit with showing me a few of the ins and outs of traditional…
Honey Mushroom Bourgignon
Once the cold weather hits, a good Bourgignon is one of the first things that I usually make each year. If you’re wondering what it is, it’s just beef burgundy (here I use venison neck but another stewing cut will work). You take some stewing meat, soak it in decent red wine overnight, then brown…
Hollyhock Sarmasi with Nuts, Mushrooms and Wild Grape
If you give me a big leaf, I can probably find something to roll up in it and call it a dolma, roulade vert, or, as with this version loosely inspired by Turkish rolls: sarmasi (Romanian sarmale is a synonym). I have a couple recipes for food rolled up in leaves on this site, but,…
Muscaria Pickles
When I first wrote about my experience detoxifying and eating Amanita, some eight years ago now, I remember getting plenty of chippy comments from people in the mushroom community portraying me as a reckless, attention-seeking newb, which I expected, and understood. Muscaria is a polarizing mushroom, to say the least. It’s widely known that if…
Puffball Ragu
A great way to cook your puffballs that just about anyone who likes a good bowl of pasta will enjoy is adding them to a simple ragu or wild mushroom pasta sauce. Puffballs are often really large, and can be a little cumbersome to work with. Slicing them into big, chunky steaks is a good,…
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…
Huitlacoche Elotes
Sweet corn season is in full swing here in the Midwest: stands filled with green spears of golden kernels dot the roadsides, parking lots of neighborhood watering holes, private drives, and just about anywhere you can fit a corn stand. Mushroom hunters know that with corn season comes another offering: Aztec black gold. Now is…
Sesame Baked Chicken of the Woods
Many recipes on this website are drawn from my study of wild food traditions from around the world. Sesame Baked Chicken of the Woods isn’t. The recipe is from an old family cookbook my Grandma Phyllis put together-you know, the kind of homestyle, church basement arrangement of pages held with plastic bindings. Sesame Baked Chicken…
Morel Escargot
I’ve gotten plenty of comments/request this year about what I do with big morels, you know, the giants, honkers, pigs and behemoths that come up at the end of the season. Seasoning them in a method similar to escargot is a fun treatment, and something you should try if you’re lucky enough to get a…