It was a great year for puffballs, right after it started to get cool we had a nice rainy spell and…POOF!, puffballs everywhere. One day of lucky hunting brought me around 30 lbs of perfect puffballs, with many more left in the woods since they were past their prime.
I like eat puffballs fresh, and find them very tasty, but a while ago I wondered what would happen if I dried and ground them into powder. I had read before that in the pioneer days of the Midwest, people would gather giant puffballs, dry them, and then use as a sort of flour to make bread. I didn’t know if I wanted to make bread, but I knew that I would have to experiment with dried puffballs this year.
Now at home, storing 30+ pounds of puffballs is quite a trick, I mean how many basketball sized items could you fit in your fridge? Luckily It was cool enough that I could leave some of the really large ones outside overnight while I sliced and dried the others over a period of a couple days. Even with the dehydrator going full speed night and day, I still needed more room to dry the mushrooms. I started to put them on baking sheets in a large oven with only the pilot light going, and that really sped things up. Nearly overnight the puffball slices were dry and crispy, but not colored or toasted at all, perfect.
Toasting the powder
The flavor of the puffball powder as is, will be good, and mushroomy, but toasting the powder by putting on a cookie sheet and baking until golden will give you even better results, or you could add oil or liquid and caramelize using a method similar to what I did with caramelized puffball puree.
So what the heck can you do with puffball powder?
Cooking with the stuff is, interesting. The first thing that I noticed is that puffball powder is so airy that it’s volume is misleading. 1 qt of puffball powder is probably around the density of ½ cup of flour, if I were to guesstimate. Other mushrooms are more dense, and when dried and pulverized they have nearly the same density of flour. Puffballs though, just do not.
The misleading weight aspect of the puffball powder means you cannot just substitute it for regular flour or gluten free flour in a recipe. Although you can fill a measuring cup with it, the actual weight of it is much less than the weight of the flour you are substituting it for.
Taking into account those couple aspects of puffball powder, it is much easier to think of it as purely a flavoring agent or seasoning as opposed to a flour substitute. It may not look like much, but It’s flavor when used as a seasoning is very strong, it can take the place of many, much more expensive mushrooms used dried for broths and sauces, like porcini or morels. I will re-update this post as I continue experimentation, but for now here are some basic tips and recipe Ideas I have dreamt up and used for the puffball powder.
- Puffball pate a choux dumplings are excellent, just toss a few tablespoons into a small batch of pate a choux. These are then poached and then fried golden brown. Follow my recipe HERE, just substitute triple the amount of puffball powder for the wild rice flour, the regular flour already in the pate a choux with stabilize it. Or simply add a few 1/2 a cup or so to my other gnocchi recipe HERE, removing the ramps and their greens.
- Adding puffball powder to any gravy or sauce is very good, it can be added to taste. When you are adding the powder to sauces though, you need to make sure that the puffball powder is incorporated with a whisk in a roux in the beginning of cooking, stirred in as part of a cornstarch slurry, or simply just puree whatever mushroom sauce you are making. The reason for this is that puffball powder gets very clumpy when simply added to boiling stock or water, like flour does.
- Seasoning the onions at the beginning stage of making a mushroom risotto with a couple large doses of puffball powder would be great.
- Adding a couple of tablespoons to a biscuit or savory pancake mix would also work very well.
- An easy puffball soufflé could be made by mixing a few tablespoons into some cooked semolina, as in my recipe HERE, minus the morels.
- Stir a couple tablespoons of puffball flour into polenta to give it a rich mushroomy-ness.
- A reason puffball powder is unique because it is pure white. I have made tasty mushroom duxelle mashed potatoes before, but they turn brown and look like piles of poop. Infusing some dairy or cream with puffball powder before mixing into mashed potatoes would keep them white, while adding a load of flavor. Blend the infused cream or dairy mixture in the blender or with an immersion blender before mixing with the potatoes to avoid clumps.
- 3 star Michelin restaurant Arzac in Spain uses a technique where ingredients are seasoned partly with a dehydrated and powdered mixture of themselves. Imagine taking a slice of fresh puffball, dipping in egg, and then into a seasoned mixture of 50/50 flour and puffball powder, then frying golden brown.
- Puffball mushroom fritters could easily be made by seasoning pate a choux dough with puffball powder, then deep frying small balls of batter, scooped out with two spoons. You could add cheese, herbs, green onions, or anything you like to your fritter batter. If piped into a deep fryer in long, thin streams, this would create a sort of puffball funnel cake.
- One could easily fashion puffball spaetzle by adding a couple tablespoons of puffball powder to a spaetzle dough, if the dough gets too thick to easily go through the spaetzle tool or cheese grater, just moisten with a little water.
- Add some puffball flour to the roux of a homemade macaroni and cheese, or other Midwestern casserole, like the classic green beans and onions.
- A type of gluten free puffball noodle could be fashioned by simply pureeing eggs in a food processor with puffball flour until the mixture gets thick enough to squirt through the tip of a plastic bottle into simmering salted water. Neither the eggs or powder contain gluten, so there would be no risk of creating an overly chewy noodle through over processing. After poaching the “noodles” until they float, they should be removed and allowed to cool on an oiled cookie sheet. Once the noodles are cool they could be fried in a Teflon pan until golden brown.
Dried Puffball Powder
Equipment
- Highspeed blender or food processor and spice grinder, dehydrator
Ingredients
- Fresh perfectly white puffballs, peeled of their skin and sliced as thin as possible, they can also be diced into small cubes.
- An oven and a few cookie sheets or dehydrator
Instructions
- Place the puffballs on cookie sheets or the drying racks of a dehydrator. If you're using an oven, put in on the lowest setting possible, and put the puffball pieces on some wax paper on the cookie sheets so they don't stick.
- Allow the puffballs to dry completely, until they're cracker dry. If you're questioning if they're dried enough, dry them longer, I usually do it overnight. (make sure to crack the window or do it in a garage or outside because your house will reek of puffball.
- Once the puffball slices are completely dried, they may be powdered in a vita-mix or other dry-capable blender. If you don't have a blender that can powder things, you can use a coffee grinder, but that will take a very long time. For added depth of flavor, you can toast the slices of puffball in an oven (325 F until barely golden) before grinding.
- When ground, the puffball powder is lighter than air, so much so that it’s culinary properties were very deceiving at first.
- After the puffball powder is ground, it can be stored indefinitely in a labeled, dated, air-tight container in a pantry or away from sunlight, then used as needed.
We just moved into a home with a great big woods and it’s flush with pear-shaped puffballs right now! This post is fantastic. Thanks for the creative ideas on how to preserve the puffball harvest.
I love your ideas on drying the puffball and am trying some of them today….
Picked an almost 20-pound puffball yesterday and had some for dinner and then dried slices of it over night with the dehydrator over night – woke up to a mushroomy sweaty feet smell all throughout the house… Have you noticed that smell before?
Ha! yes. It’s less pronounced in a restaurant where I have hood systems that suck up air. Open the windows for air flow, and make darn sure to keep a close eye on the puffballs to make sure they are dehydrating properly. You don’t want them to go bad in the dehydrator.
My husband dried puffballs in the dehydrator in the house and the smell was revolting to me so we moved the operation outside. It took awhile for it to dissipate. I am happy to try your recipes since the pow Eder has been in the pantry a year now and even though it’s zip lock bagged, the smell is white evident.
Yes the smell is quite powerful. I also recommend blending/pulverizing the powder outside.
My buddy just brought me two soccer sized puffballs, the first of which I sliced and cut into 3/4″ cubes and partially sauteed, cooled and re-sauteed after i had done the whole mushroom, I used some cream soup base and made mushroom soup, also added about a pound of frozen “hen in the wood” another buddy had dropped off the previous week. The soup was awesome by itself and i baked chicken breasts in it also and served over rice. Wow. the second one I dehydrated, was fun, mushroom powder everywhere even if I was careful, wasn’t sure what to do with it, tonight breaded my liver in puffball and flax seed, was excellent. Thanks for some additional ideas!!!
Sounds like you had some great treats. Glad you got something out of the posts.
Wow! Breading liver with it! Sounds delicious!
I’m really curious about the egg-powder noodles. That seems like fun! Just tried it as an experiment, with one egg and a bunch of powder (my thinking was that if the experiment was deemed close enough of a success, I’d try again with measurements. It was… ) Anyway, it was difficult to whisk the powder into the egg, so I’ll use a high speed blender next time, perhaps. I also likely did not use enough powder, as it definitely didn’t hold together like a noodle. That said, the light web/foam of the mushroom-egg that I pulled out of my salted water was delicious!
So next time, blend, more powder, anything else you might suggest?
I didn’t get to the browning of the noodles yet, but I’m thinking of using brown butter, then topped with a very light parsley-preserved lemon-olive-hot pepper something or other.
(Thinking of using this as an appetizer in a progressive dinner I’m working on…)
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Yes, I’d add more powder, and maybe it would be good to try a proportion of flour to bind it, unless you’re GF.
Um…having done this for years, why wouldn’t you want to dry and then toast some of them? Having done so, I do that with more of my puffballs than I can eat fresh. Dry (oven or dehydrator). Toast until brown (oven). Break up and put in a food processor OUTSIDE. (A mistake you make only once, the powder is finer than talcum, it seriously come outta the processor through gaps you didn’t know existed like someone puffing a cigarette in your face…DONT do this inside, you’ll clean for days, thank me once you see it…). Toasted puff powder goes in ANY Stew, gravy, or Soup I make, The rich, earthy, deep umami toastiness comes through. Even a TBSP or 2 in Chili kicks everything up a notch. Don’t get me wrong, I respect what you are doing turning them into flour…but I think you may need to try that same fine powder toasted in some of of your other cooking.
Thanks Ward, you’re totally right about using a blender or food processor outside, that’s a great tip. Also toasting the powder is obviously going to add a lot more flavor to something than if it’s dried, as I allude to in the caramelized puree recipe on this website. After I get back from an event this weekend I’m going to ammend the post to include your info, thanks for sharing your knowledge. Alan.
Hi, I dehydrated puffball mushrooms. Is there any way to hydrate them to cook with. Without making it into powder. We love to cook them in scrambled eggs, soups and pizza. My problem is when I dehydrated them. I put them in soup and they disappeared. I was so bummed. Can you help me.
Cyndi Absolon
Hi Cyndi. You’ll get the best results with creamy soups, as puffball flour likes dairy. You could also try making my puffball gnocchi and floating them in a soup. Also, yes, you could cut them into cubes and dry them, but I can’t speak to the texture after dehydrating.
This powder MUST be processed outside, AND use a face mask! I pushed my dried slices through a stainless steel fine sive ..First time in the kitchen . Not a good idea as there was dust EVERYWHERE ! Also though I have no allergies I developed a cough that lasted 2 days. Could have only been the dust.
I have vacume packed my product and think that my family will recieve an unusual ingredient in their hamper this Christmas
The problem is that you’re putting it through a sieve, which will put tons of particles in the air. If you use a high speed blender or something similar with a sealed bowl you won’t
Have that problem. Puffball lung sounds, not fun.
1. when would you toast? you mention it in the foreward but in the recipe never state where–toast the dehydrated slices BEFORE blending? toast the powder after? does the powder stay put on a cookie sheet in the air currents of an oven?
2. re: puffball lung, apparently a few years back some kids, convinced they were “doing mushrooms,” snorted puffball spores. Since they took in millions, or billions, apparently they ended up needing to be treated w actual anti-fungals for what was a legit case of “puffball lung.” only in wisconsin…. 🙁
Hey good question. So, You can technically do either, but it’s much easier and less messy to lightly toast slices of dried puffball as opposed to powder.
awesome (well, less awesome now I partially pulverized my nice, dry strips…) What temp, and thank you!
Try 325 F until light Golden. Watch them closely.
Love this article. How do I store the powder. I have it in a glass jar but do I refrigerate? Freeze?
Fine to store it at room temp, but you can freeze it too.
Just read this, but I’ve been making puffball powder for a few weeks, now. My reason for doing it is that I only ever find a few every day (I’m new to this area, so hopefully will find more next year) and never enough to cook with (they’re very small around here, northwest Bulgaria) so drying them and making powder was a brainwave I had. The powder smells extraordinarily funky, though, very dried fishy, but I’ll just use a bit at a time until I get the measure of it. Im doing the same with shaggy ink-caps. Excited at the thought of my flavour-enhanced winter stews!
It’s good stuff.
Thanks for posting this recipe. I tried this on a puffball that was, I thought, perfectly white when sliced. I used a dehydrator and some of the slices now have a yellow or light mauve color after drying over night. Does this mean the puffball was no good, or is this akin to oxidation on fruit?
That means your puffball was a little older than it seemed. It happens.
Thank you so much for this wonderful and soooooo helpful post. I came upon 2 basketball sized puffballs in our woods and after cutting, cubing and having puffball pizza and stir-fried mock teriyaki I was left with gallons of mushroom. I froze more than a gallon as well. So puffball powder was perfect and yes messy even with being very careful. I used it in turkey burger for breakfast this morning and it was super delicious.
Looking forward to using it with ground flax and seasonings to fry liver. Your recipe ideas are amazing.
Also gifting a few close friends. I still had 4 quarts of powder after all I used and froze. Wow and Yum.
Glad you found it helpful.