For Halloween one year when I was the chef at Lucia’s Restaurant in Minneapolis I thought it would be fun to run a dish that combined orange and black. Black trumpets and squash gnocchi fit the bill, and it’s a dish that’s stayed in my repertoire ever since. Making gnocchi from sweet potatoes or squash…
Black Trumpets
Black trumpet mushrooms are one of the most prized wild mushrooms in the world, and, no matter where you live, you can likely find some (or at least a related cousin near you). If you're new to foraging black trumpets, check out my introductory post on them. If you have some you'd like to cook, don't miss black trumpets with caramelized shallots, or my candied black trumpets.
There's more than one type of black trumpet too. Cerulean blue trumpets and fragrants should also be on your list to taste-both are even better than regular trumpets.
Cerulean trumpets have a blue cast to them.
Maple-Black Trumpet Jam
Black trumpet jam is a fantastic sweet and savory recipe using fresh or dried black trumpet mushrooms that can change the way you consider cooking with your haul. Earlier this summer, I finally had the pleasure of meeting Chad Hyatt, chef turned freelancer and author of the book The Mushroom Hunters Kitchen. At the event…
Black Trumpet Potato Puree
Black trumpet potato puree (think dried-mushrooms pureed into mashed potatoes) came from a dish I’d heard about when I was moonlighting as the stylist on Lenny Russo’s cookbook. Over the course of the eight month project, photographer Tom Thulen and I would work off a list of dishes from different sections each week, chosen by…
Wild Rice Casserole with Ground Venison and Mushrooms
Venison, tender cabbage, black trumpet mushrooms, real wild rice covered in plenty of cheesy white sauce and baked to a perfect golden brown makes me happy. In the Midwest, we know a thing or two about casseroles. Some of them I really like (all casseroles with wild rice, especially my classic chicken of the woods-wild…
Angelos Dried Wild Mushroom Ragu
A simple ragu of wild mushrooms was one of the recipes on the saute station back in the day when I was working at the now-closed Trattoria Da Vinci under Chef Angelo Volpicelli. Angelo was super talented, barely spoke English, and had owned his own restaurant in Rome for 12 years. Twelve years is a…
Baked Fish with Black Trumpet Crust
When Sitka Salmon sent me loads of fish to cook with this year in preparation for a project we were working on, I started working on a few great ways to use frozen fish, especially white-fleshed fish like black rockfish and cod. Making a topping with dried black trumpets, leeks and tomatoes was one of…
Candied Black Trumpets
Candied mushrooms? Like, with sugar?? Hard pass. Candied mushrooms are the sort of frou-frou B.S. I’d expect 15 year old me to try making, or a young cook still trying to figure out what a palette is. Honestly, I found the idea so annoying it was nearly offensive. These are mushrooms we’re talking about, I…
Simple Black Trumpet-Potato Gratin
Potatoes are a perfect partner for mushrooms since they won’t overpower them. They let the mushroom take center stage, which is exactly what I want after I spent half of the day on my hands and knees with a scissors cutting black trumpets off of the ground. One of the easiest, and tastiest things I…
Dried Black Trumpet-Ramp Butter
I’ve never met a wild mushroom butter I didn’t like, and the few variations on the simple theme (especially the fresh porcini butter) are some of the most trusty and popular recipes on this website. For the most part, you can substitute different mushrooms in the basic recipe, but this one I developed especially to…
Cerulean Black Trumpets
The best part of hunting mushrooms are the random things you stumble across. You might be getting skunked, with not a mushroom to be found, then out of nowhere a pile of somethings jump out to save the day, or, more likely, you just find a fungus that you have no idea what it is,…
Turkey Wild Rice Soup with Black Trumpets
As far as food is concerned, the main course for holidays will change here and there. One year it’s a ham for Christmas, the next year we’ll smoke a prime rib. One thing that’s constant is somewhere along the line there’s probably turkey at one of the gatherings I’ll attend, either for my girlfriend’s family…
Dried Wild Mushroom Stroganoff
Nothing said comfort food to me like a steaming hot bowl of mom’s stroganoff growing up. I don’t know what she put in hers, but more than likely it was a couple cans of cream of mushroom soup and some beef chuck. It wasn’t something we’d have every week, but it was definitely in the…
Beef Neck Terrine
I’ve created more versions of pates and terrines than I can count, and some of them blur together, but one sticks out above the rest: the beef neck terrine. It was a crowd favorite, but also burned in my mind as one server repeatedly asked me to show her where the fruit was. She was…