I’m a wild mushroom devotee. Hunting mushrooms, researching, harvesting, cleaning, cooking, preserving-I love it all. Up until now, I’ve only shared mushrooms I enjoy eating. The old man of the woods (Strombilomyces) is one I do not like, eat, or tell others they should eat. In fact, it’s got to be one of my least…
Boletes
Bolete mushrooms are the fleshy mushrooms with pores under the cap instead of gills, including the famous porcini and many others. The classifications in the links below are the four most common genera I'm most familiar with, but know this is only a sample of the boletes that are out there, so know there are more boletes to find. The rest of the posts below are a catch all for posts on boletes or where I think they would work well in one way or another. Use it as inspiration.
Smoked Oxtails with Dried Mushrooms and Tomato
Oxtails charred over a wood fire and braised with dried boletes, stock and tomato is a great way to enjoy one of the finest cuts the cow has to offer. Literally the richest, most dense, collagen-packed meat on the animal, oxtails are a special treat, and I make sure to scoop up a few packs…
Cornflower Blue Bolete
An edible blue-staining bolete The beauty of Nature is all around us, and with mushrooms, if there’s a better parlor trick than showing someone whose never seen it a mushroom stain deep blue after being cut, I don’t know it. Gyroporus cyanescens a.k.a the cornflower (as in cornflower blue), or blueing bolete is probably the…
French Lentils with Sauteed Wild Mushrooms
When I got back from hunting with a bag full of fresh Gyroporus cyanescens, one of the only boletes I prefer fresh to dried, this is what I made. It’s super simple, and just a snapshot of the simple European food I usually cook at home. First you make a soffrito by finely chopping some…
Toasted Porcini Aioli
During the Winter after a really good year for boletes (likely the legendary Pallidoroseus haul of 2013) I started making all kinds of things with my dried shrooms. Cooking with European porcini is easy: just throw them in anything and the flavor will take over. The porcini I pick in Minnesota (Boletus atkinsonii, or whatever…
Double Mushroom Ravioli
A few years ago I got a request from a reader to make “double mushroom ravioli” or ravioli with dried mushrooms in the dough and filling. I spent a few days tweaking a couple batches, but, as luck will have it, I accidentally selected something wrong and named the images incorrectly, which meant they ended…
Chrome-Footed Bolete
My friend has one of those private land patches, the kind you keep to yourself. Typically we might try to go there together specifically for black trumpets during the season, and the picking is incredible–calling it hunting is not even the right term when you bring a scissors instead of a knife. Some years it’s…
The Chestnut Bolete
That, that is a very small bolete, is what I thought the first few times I ran into Gyroporus castaneus, also known as the chestnut bolete. Most of the time when I find them they’re itt-bitty, teeny-tiny, and scattered. So scattered in fact, that it’s easy to just pay them no mind, I mean, I…
