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Award-winning chef, author and forager Alan Bergo. Food is all around you.

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Fresh Pasta with Beef and Dried Morel Ragu

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Winter Morel

Winter: a time to fruitlessly attempt using all the dried mushrooms you hoarded last season.

Winter means snow, cold, and a chance to try to use up some of the preserves I’ve put up for the year. I didn’t put up a ton of fruit this year, but I still picked plenty of mushrooms.

grass fed beef, morel, dried morels,

Here’s a dish using dried morels and fresh pasta that’s easy and familiar, but interesting enough for people who are more adventurous or curious about food history. It all has to do with how the meat it cut for the sauce.

When we think of pasta sauce that includes meat, most of the time you’re going to think of ground meat, since it disperses in the sauce and is the basis for most recipes we’ve come to know in America. In “The Fine Art of Italian Cooking”, one of my favorite books by Giuliano Bugialli, the author discusses what pasta sauces with meat have looked like throughout the centuries.

Garganelli, pasta, fresh pasta,

Cutting fresh garganelli/penne noodles. Any shape or noodle you like would be fine though.

The book is filled with old techniques, pictures of ancient manuscripts, and simple to complex, technically rigid recipes. Bugialli is a meticulous stickler for tradition, and goes deeper to trace the historical foundations of recipes than any author I’ve ever read.

One of the pasta sauces he discusses in the book is a sauce where the meat is cut with scissors into little pieces rather than being ground. Bugialli claims it keeps the texture of the meat more than when it’s ground and allowed to cook into an amalgamous mass. I personally like pasta sauce any which way, but it’s fun to know an alternate method the next time you’re craving some good old fashioned meat sauce.

grass fed beef, morel, dried morels,

Fresh pasta with braised beef and dried morel ragout
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Fresh Pasta with Beef and Dried Morel Ragu

Fresh egg noodles with a beef and morel mushroom sauce. Feel free to use your favorite fresh pasta recipe, or you could try the small batch I list below that's tried and true. I made large penne shapes here, but any old shape or noodle you like would be fine. 
Course: Main Course
Cuisine: American
Keyword: Beef, Morels, Pasta

Ingredients

  • 1 lb grass fed beef chuck chopped roughly into 1/4 inch pieces or snipped with a scissors.
  • 2 small cloves of garlic minced
  • 1/2 tablespoon tomato paste
  • 1/4 cup carrots diced 1/4 inch
  • 1/4 cup celery diced 1/4 inch
  • 1/4 cup onion diced 1/4 inch
  • 2 cups beef stock preferably homemade
  • 1 ounce dried morel mushrooms
  • 1/2 cup dried red wine
  • 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
  • Kosher salt and pepper
  • 1 Teaspoon fresh chopped Italian parsley
  • Fresh grated grana padano or parmigiano for serving
  • 1 recipe pasta dough follows

Instructions

  • Re-hydrate the morels in water to cover for 30 minutes. Agitate the morels in their liquid to dislodge dirt, then remove them from their liquid, strain the liquid through a coffee filter, and reserve the two separately. Roughly chop the morels.
  • Heat the butter in a deep sided saute pan with a lid, add the vegetables and garlic and cook slowly on medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes.
  • Add the beef and cook 10 minutes more, seasoning with salt and pepper. Finally add the tomato paste, stir and cook for another 10 minutes. Add the wine and cook down until evaporated. Add the stock, morels and their strained liquid and cook covered with the lid ajar for 1 hour on low heat, or until the meat is tender.
  • Double check the seasoning for salt and pepper, then serve immediately, tossing the sauce with the pasta, parsley and butter, garnishing with parmesan. OR refrigerate the sauce and cool, uncovered in a labeled, dated container. When the sauce is cooled, cover it.
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Fresh Semolina Pasta Dough

A small batch. This will make enough to serve 4-6 people as a small entree when sauced Yield: 1 lb

Ingredients

  • 1/4 cup semolina flour
  • 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 teaspoon sea salt
  • 1 large eggs beaten
  • 1/8 c. warm water

Instructions

  • Combine the flours and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer with the egg and mix, slowly drizzling in the water until a rough dough forms. Continue to work the dough until it comes together, about 5-10 minutes on the lowest speed setting.
  • When the dough cleans the sides of the bowl and comes together in a solid mass, remove it from the mixer and allow to rest, wrapped in plastic for 30 minutes.
  • Alternately, pile the flour and salt into a mound on a cutting board and make a well in the center, then add the eggs and mix together with a fork, gradually adding the water as needed and working the mixture with your hands.

More 

Forager’s Guide to Morel Mushrooms

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  1. Morel Mushroom Recipes, a delicious round-up | The Twin Cedars says:
    April 12, 2017 at 5:05 am

    […] Fresh Pasta with Grass Fed Beef and Dried Morel Mushrooms: Forager Chef […]

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FORAGER | CHEF®
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Author: The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora
James Beard Award ‘22
Host: Field Forest Feast 👇
streaming on @tastemade

Alan Bergo
Had a blast on the last day of the @wild.fed shoot Had a blast on the last day of the @wild.fed shoot cooking in the Garden of Eden, a.k.a Sam Thayer’s orchard. 

We’d planned on making ground squirrel, bullfrog and crayfish gumbo but only the crayfish came through. Luckily I had some back up andouille just in case. 

It’s may not be traditional, but gumbo with crayfish broth, a heap of @mushroomforaginginmn porcini, milkweed pods (in lieu of okra) wild rice and crayfish-chanterelle salad didn’t suck. 6 of us polished off a gallon 😁.

H/o to chef Lenny Russo who I pestered with questions on frog-based foods beforehand. Hyper-local meals like this are what we made at Heartland in St Paul during my tenure there. 

@danielvitalis 
@grantguiliano 

#ditchlobster #mudbugs #gumbo #crayfish #wildrice #wildfed
Long, fun day snatching crayfish out of the water Long, fun day snatching crayfish out of the water by hand with Sam Thayer and @danielvitalis for @wild.fed 

Daniel and Sam were the apex predators, but I got a few. 

Without a net catching crayfish by hand is definitely a wax-on wax-off sort of skill. Clears your mind. 

They’re going into gumbo with porcini, sausage and milkweed pods today. 

#crayfish #ninjareflexes #waxonwaxoff #normalthings #onset🎥🎬
Working all day on preps for cattail lateral rhizo Working all day on preps for cattail lateral rhizomes and blueberries for this weeks shoot with @wildfed 

Been a few years since I worked with these. Thankfully Sam Thayer dropped a couple off for me to work with. They’re tender, crisp and delicious. 

Sam mentioned their mild flavor and texture could be because they don’t have to worry about predators eating them, since they grow in the muck of cattail marshes. 

I think they could use a pet name. Pond tusk? Swamp spears? Help me out here. 😂

Nature makes the coolest things. 

#itcamefromthepond #cattail #rhizomes #foraging #typhalatifolia
I liked the staff meal I made for Mondays shoot so I liked the staff meal I made for Mondays shoot so much we filmed it instead of the original dish I’d planned. 

Cooked natural wild rice (not the black shiny stuff) is great hot, cold, sweet or savory. It’s a perfect, filling lunch for a long day of berry picking. 

I make them with whatever I have on hand. Mushrooms will fade into the background a little here, so I use a bunch of them, along with lots of herbs and hickory nut oil + dill flowers. 

I’m eating the leftovers today back up in the barrens (hopefully) getting some more bluebs for another shoot this week w @wild.fed 

#wilwilwice #wildrice #chanterelles #campfood #castironcooking
Baby’s first homegrown mushrooms! Backyard wine Baby’s first homegrown mushrooms! Backyard wine caps on hardwood sawdust from my lumberjack buddy.

Next up blewits. Spawn from @northsporemushrooms

#winecaps #strophariaaeruginosa #allthemushroomtags
It’s wild cherry season. I’ll be picking from It’s wild cherry season. I’ll be picking from my favorite spot tomorrow a.m. and have room for a couple helpers. It’s at an event on a farm just south of St. Cloud. 

If you’re interested send me a message and I’ll raffle off the spots. Plenty of cherries to go around. I’ll be leading a short plant walk around the farm too. 

#chokecherries #foraging #prunusvirginiana #summervibes
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