• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

FORAGER | CHEF

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

  • Home
  • About
  • Mushrooms
    • Mushroom Archive
    • Posts by Species
      • Other Mushrooms
        • Lobster Mushrooms
        • Huitlacoche
        • Shrimp of the Woods
        • Truffles
        • Morels
        • Shaggy Mane
        • Hericium
        • Puffball
      • Polypores
        • Hen of the Woods
        • Dryad Saddle
        • Chicken of The Woods
        • Cauliflowers
        • Ischnoderma
        • Beefsteak
      • Chanterelles
        • Black Trumpet
        • Hedgehogs
        • Yellowfeet
      • Gilled
        • Matsutake
        • Honey Mushrooms
        • Russula / Lactarius
          • Candy Caps
          • Saffron Milkcap
          • Indigo Milkcap
      • Boletes
        • Porcini
        • Leccinum
        • Slippery Jacks
    • Recipes
      • Fresh
      • Dried
      • Preserves
    • The Basics
  • Plants
    • Plant Archive
    • Leafy Green Recipes
      • Leafy Green Plant Varieties
    • Ramps and Onions
    • Wild Herbs and Spices
      • Spruce and Conifers
      • Pollen
      • Prickly Ash
      • Bergamot / Wild Oregano
      • Spicebush
      • Golpar / Cow Parsnip
      • Wild Carraway
    • Wild Fruit
      • Wild Plums
      • Highbush Cranberry
      • Wild Grapes
      • Rowanberries
      • Wild Cherries
      • Aronia
      • Nannyberry
      • Wild Blueberries
    • From The Garden
    • Nuts, Roots, Tubers and Grains
    • Stalks and Shoots
  • Meat
    • Four-Legged Animals
      • Venison
      • Small Game
    • Poultry
    • Fish/Seafood
    • Offal and Organ Meat Recipes
    • Charcuterie
  • Recipes
    • Pickles, Preserves, Etc
    • Fermentation
    • Condiments
    • Appetizers
    • Soup
    • Salad
    • Side Dishes
    • Entrees
    • Baking
    • Sweets
  • Video
    • Field, Forest Feast (The Wild Harvest)
    • Foraging Videos
    • Lamb and Goat Series
    • YouTube Tutorials
  • Press
    • Podcasts / Interviews
  • Work
    • Public Speaking
    • Charity and Private Dinners
    • Forays / Classes / Demos

“Last Chance” Cream Of Chanterelle Soup

Jump to Recipe Print Recipe
cream of chanterelle mushroom soup recipe

Chanterelle cream soup, with baby chanterelles

If you are a chanterelle hunter, you will likely have experienced this scenario:

You get home from your successful chanterelle hunt, you start to unload the mushrooms in the kitchen and prepare to clean and process them. You wash the mushrooms briefly if needed, allow them to drain and dry, and then proceed to cut some up into reasonably sized-edible pieces and cook. When you cut some of the larger mushrooms in half, you notice something strange, they are nearly hollow inside, some with little tunnels and discolored bits.

Feeling discouraged you start cutting some of the smaller ones in half as well, to check for similar damage. To your horror, one of the mushrooms has maggots inside of it: moving, writhing, wiggling maggots, each with a puny black dot on it’s head. When you expose them from inside their mushroom home, they get agitated and start to writhe and squirm violently, shaking their little maggot tails back and forth and moving around quickly, or scurrying back into a tunnel they have carved within the mushroom. Absolutely disgusted, you hurl the mushroom across the room into the garbage, shouting a flurry of expletives.

buggy chanterelles

The chanterelles looked great a couple days ago, what happened?!

Wild mushrooms are expensive, pound for pound more expensive than any sort of meat or protein I have ever purchased. When you pay that much for something, as a chef or restauranteur you must squeeze as much money as possible from it. Having a bug or two is absolutely acceptable, and I can tell you, never once in my life has a customer complained of or been squeemish about bug damage in a chanterelle, or any wild mushroom for that matter. Mostly I assume this is due to the public’s ignorance of the bugs very existence though.

However, bug damage can get to a point that even I cannot tolerate sometimes. If mushrooms sit in the fridge for a while (especially boletes) the bugs inside them are not dormant; quite the contrary. I have heard tales of the maggots even migrating out of the mushrooms themselves to crawl around in the crisper, as well as having personally witnessed it myself as well with mature chicken of the woods.

This little rant about mushroom bugs has a happy ending though. I was recently trying to figure out how to use some chanterelles on the brink of death. They came in nice enough via air-freight, but Midwest chanterelles have much more bugs than others, such as from the Pacific Northwest. They sat for a day or two, and it seemed the bugs had laid siege to them in the cooler. We had to use and process the chanterelles quickly, but what to do? Their integrity was far too compromised to be simply sauteed, and even though customers still wouldn’t know the difference….we would.

Normally I want to use chanterelles whole or thickly sliced, but, to hide their injuries I decided we would make a pureed soup. I wanted to rely on the heaviness of cream, but lighten it by not adding flour. The binder would be the pureed chanterelles themselves as well as cooked down white sweet onion. Try it if you have some bug damaged chantys.

cream of chanterelle soup

No sir, I’m not seeing any bugs in this soup. Are you?

cream of chanterelle mushroom soup recipe
Print Recipe
5 from 3 votes

Last Chance Cream of Chanterelle Soup

Yield: enough to serve 4 people a small 4 oz bowl, about 6 cups
Prep Time30 mins
Cook Time45 mins
Course: Appetizer, Soup
Cuisine: French
Keyword: Chanterelle Soup, Cream of chanterelle soup
Servings: 4

Ingredients

  • 1 recipe pickled chanterelles to garnish I have a recipe for pickles here
  • 1 lb firm bug damaged chanterelle mushrooms
  • 1 cup diced yellow onion
  • 1 cup diced leek white part only
  • 1/2 cup diced bread for croutons
  • 3 tbsp butter
  • 2 cups of cream
  • 1/4 cup grapeseed canola, or light- taste free olive oil (to be added as the soup is pureed)
  • 1/2 cup dry white wine
  • 1.5 cups of homemade chicken stock stock plus an additional 1/2 cup
  • A Bouquet garni optional consisting of: 2 fresh bay leaves, 1 small sprig of thyme, and 1 tsp of black peppercorns

Instructions

  • Heat the butter in a deep pot, add the chanterelles and cook, seasoning with a generous pinch of salt to release the juice from the chanterelles and stirring often, until they are fully cooked and have reduced in size by half. Continue cooking the chanterelles until they brown slightly, this deepens their flavor.
  • Add the diced onion and leek and cook for 5 minutes more, stirring occasionally.
  • Add the 1/2 cup of chicken stock and reduce until it is gone (about 5 minutes) and the onions are thoroughly cooked and soft.
  • Add the wine and cook for a few minutes, until reduced by half. Add the stock and cream, heat until the mixture comes to a simmer
  • When the mixture simmers, remove the bouquet garni, then puree the soup in a blender, adding equal portions of the grapeseed oil to each batch while pureeing- this adds air, helps it to puree, and improves it's velvety texture.Finally pass the soup through a metal or mesh strainer. If you have a vita-mix or industrial blender, you may not need to strain this, and if you just don't feel like straining it, thats ok, just make sure to give it plenty of time on high in the blender, until it is as smooth as you like. Season the soup to taste with salt if needed and then refrigerate immediately.
  • To plate, heat the soup, check the seasoning for salt and pepper, then garnish with toasted croutons pickled chanterelles, and the chives.

Notes

To achieve the smooth consistency of this soup I make sure to add the oil while it's pureeing in the blender. Oil added at the moment when something is being pureed reduces friction, giving you the creamiest result possible. This is a technique you can use anytime you use the blender for sauces, and is a great tip to remember.

Related

Previous Post: « Puffball Mushroom-Cheese Croquettes, With Ramp Ketchup
Next Post: Amanita Muscaria or Fly Agaric Mushroom »

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Dan Farmer

    August 27, 2013 at 12:57 pm

    Chanterelles and cream go so well together! That soup is essentially a thinner version of the sauce that I usually make for chicken or pork.

    As always, I love your photography and presentations here, Alan. Do you do that yourself?

    Reply
    • Alan Bergo

      August 28, 2013 at 12:34 am

      Whatsup Dan! Chanterelles and cream go together well indeed! As for your question, yes. I don’t have much money at all, and I do not have the resources many bloggers do to curate their site using professional photographers and web designers. All I have is a friend who told me I needed to do it and occasionally gives me counseling and advice. I know nothing about photography, except that I plate things like I would at work, and just try to make things look how they do in my mind. If you like the pics, thank you! Often I worry about them becoming redundant looking from my lack of experience. Perhaps there are some cheap community ed classes I can take. Who knows.

      Let’s go hunt some hens when they come around this season eh? Shouldn’t be long with honeys and entolomas up.

      Reply
  2. Nicole Novak

    August 27, 2013 at 2:29 pm

    I was shocked to see maggot damage to your chanterelles. One if the best things about our Pacific Northwest Chanties is their LACK of infestation. In fact, we can leave babies for as long as we want without fear of invasion by bugs. Interesting post, lovely recipe and photos. Tx!

    Reply
    • Alan Bergo

      August 28, 2013 at 12:26 am

      Hi Nicole!

      I am indeed aware of the resistance to bugs your PNW chanterelles have. Typically I will clean and process around 4-500 lbs of them a year. 99.9% of them are totally bug free. I am unsure what the reason is, but I am also quite sure that it is a different variety of chanterelle that grows in quantity in the PNW, my research points to one “cantharellus formosus”. It is not as aromatic as the chanterelles that grow in the midwest that I pick, but their resistance to bugs is astounding. Often Oregon chanterelles that I see lack the egg yolk yellow color of our midwest variety, they are often more on the brown side. I have also run into batches of PNW chanterelles that are incredibly bitter and near inedible. I do not know what makes this happen. Regardless, I love them all.

      Cheers if you liked the post, it was a fun one to write.

      Good luck out there.

      Reply
      • Robert Malcolm Kay

        August 31, 2020 at 2:06 pm

        5 stars
        It was also a lot of fun to read 😉

        Reply
  3. John Lewis

    November 7, 2013 at 3:21 pm

    Thank you for the recipe I will try it today. We are in the middle of a chanterelle explosion here in Oregon right now. Soup on a rainy Oregon day sounds real good.

    Reply
    • Alan Bergo

      November 11, 2013 at 3:41 pm

      Great to hear, hope you like the recipe! Remember though that I was using this to transform damaged chanterelles, using large, chopped chanterelles and a simple flour liason or roux with some dairy would make a great soup that will allow you to keep them whole or in pieces, as opposed to being blended.

      Good luck hunting those chanterelles in the PNW!

      A

      Reply
      • David Gutches

        October 11, 2021 at 7:25 pm

        5 stars
        Hi, posting from the PNW also and would like to know if this soup does well to be frozen? Thanks!

        Reply
        • Alan Bergo

          October 12, 2021 at 8:31 am

          Yes that’s fine. You may need to puree it again as it may separate during freezing.

          Reply
  4. Diki Shamlian Gust

    October 18, 2015 at 2:21 am

    How do/did you get rid of the maggots?

    Reply
    • Alan Bergo

      October 19, 2015 at 2:07 pm

      Like I explain in the post, you can’t get rid of the maggots. I also can’t afford to throw away hundreds of dollars of chanterelles, this is why the soup is pureed.

      Reply
      • Diki Shamlian Gust

        October 20, 2015 at 4:15 am

        I presume you mean the soup is served containing the maggots.

        Reply
        • Dan F

          October 20, 2015 at 9:31 am

          I’ve picked many pounds of morels, and while many of them have the bug holes, I personally have yet to actually see a “maggot” or any other bug in them, even aided with a jeweler’s loupe.

          That said, keep in mind that the term “maggot” has connotations that really don’t apply here. These would not be house fly maggots or anything like that. They would be maggots in the sense of being the larvae of an insect, but not ones that hang out in garbage cans.

          Reply
          • Diki Shamlian Gust

            October 21, 2015 at 5:43 am

            After reading this : “To your horror, one of the mushrooms has maggots inside of it: moving, writhing, wiggling maggots, each with a puny black dot on it’s head. When you expose them from inside their mushroom home, they get agitated and start to writhe and squirm violently, shaking their little maggot tails back and forth and moving around quickly, or scurrying back into a tunnel they have carved within the mushroom. Absolutely disgusted, you hurl the mushroom across the room into the garbage, shouting a flurry of expletives.” Your comment had me totally confused until I realized you (collectively) were different people.

          • Dan F

            October 21, 2015 at 7:34 am

            Yes, I am not the author, and I was speaking only of my own experiences.

Trackbacks

  1. Chanterelle Custard With Hedgehog Mushrooms And Chives says:
    July 20, 2014 at 10:34 am

    […] What I’m getting at here is that when you pay good money for chanterelles they must not go to waste. After a large batch of them came in last year from Michigan and deteriorated in only a few days, I made a soup from them which I gave a recipe for here. […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recipe Rating




Primary Sidebar

2022 James Beard Nominee

beard award

Subscribe (It’s free)

ORDER THE BOOK

UPDATED OPTIONS FOR CA / EU / US the forager chefs book of flora by Chef Alan Bergo

Forager Chef

Forager Chef

Footer

Instagram

foragerchef

FORAGER | CHEF®
🍄🌱🍖
Author: The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora
2022 James Beard Nominee
Host: Field Forest Feast 👇
streaming on @tastemade

Alan Bergo
Oeufs de Gaulle is a classic morel recipe Jacques Oeufs de Gaulle is a classic morel recipe Jacques Pepin used to make for French president Charles de Gaulle. 

You bake eggs in a ramekin with shrimp topped with creamy morel sauce and eat with toast points. 

Makes for a really special brunch or breakfast. Recipe’s on my site, but it’s even better to watch Jacques make it on you tube. 

#jacquespepin #morels #shrimp #morilles #brunchtime
Morels: the only wild mushroom I count by the each Morels: the only wild mushroom I count by the each instead of the pound. 

Good day today, although my Twin Cities spots seem a full two weeks behind from the late spring. 2 hours south they were almost all mature. 

76 for me and 152 for the group. Check your spots, and good luck! 

#morels #murkels #mollymoochers #drylandfish #spongemushroom #theprecious
The first time I’ve seen fungal guttation-a natu The first time I’ve seen fungal guttation-a natural secretion of water I typically see with plants. 

I understand it as an indicator that the mushrooms are growing rapidly, and a byproduct of their metabolism speeding up. If you have some clarifications, chime in. 

Most people know it from Hydnellum 
peckii-another polypore. I’ve never seen it on pheasant backs before.

Morels are coming soon too. Mine were 1 inch tall yesterday in the Twin Cities. 

#guttation #mushroomhunting #cerioporussquamosus #pheasantback #naturesbeauty
Rain and heat turned the flood plain forest into a Rain and heat turned the flood plain forest into a grocery store. 

#groceryshopping #sochan #rudbeckialaciniata #foraging
Italian wild food traditions are some of my favori Italian wild food traditions are some of my favorite. 

Case in point: preboggion, a mixture of wild plants, that, depending on the reference, should be made with 5-23 individual plants. 

Here’s a few mixtures I’ve made this spring, along with a reference from the Oxford companion to Italian food. 

The mixture should include some bitter greens (typically assorted asters) but the most important plant is probably borage. 

Making your own version is a good excercise. Here they’re wilted with garlic and oil, but there’s a bunch of traditional recipes the mixture is used in. 

Can you believe this got cut from my book?!

#preboggion #preboggiun #foraging #traditionalfoods
Oh the things I get in the mail. This is my kind Oh the things I get in the mail. 

This is my kind of tip though: a handmade buckskin bag with a note and a handful of bleached snapping turtle claws. 😁😂 

Sent in by Leslie, a reader. 

Smells like woodsmoke and the cat quickly claimed it as her new bed. 

#buckskin #mailsurprise #turtleclaws #thisimylife #cathouse
Load More... Follow on Instagram

Privacy

  • Privacy Policy

Affiliate Disclosure

 I may earn a small commission for my endorsement, recommendation, testimonial, and/or link to any products or services from this website. Your purchases help keep this website free and help with the many costs involved with this site as it has continued to grow over the years. 

Copyright © 2022 ·