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…
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.
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…
Jaegerschnitzel with Leccinum Gravy and Acorn Spaetzle
The snow is quickly melting, and I’ve been working hard to use up my stores of 2018 preserves. I have a lot of mushrooms and game (mostly venison), but, it was a great year for acorns too-I discovered a new white oak that gave the best acorns I’ve had yet. Thinking of how I could…
Chicken Fat Bolete Caramelle
2018 update Forgive me for the silly plating, I, like a lot of chefs, I went through a paint brush stage. It’s much cleaner to spread dollops of the celery root sauce out with a spoon or ladle. Italian food was what drew me into the kitchen in the first place. Story goes that I…
Lamb Broth With Boletus Pallidus and Rice
Whole animal butchery is something I’ve wanted to be more skilled at for a number of years. Sure, I’ve purchase thousands of pounds of ruminant meat and try to process whole fowl whenever I can, but whole lamb, pigs, and cows can be big, costly and intimidating. Luckily my girlfriend has a farm where all…
Duck Egg-Ricotta Omelet with Boletes, Herbs and Chickweed
I have a lot of friends who hunt mushrooms, but my friend Olena is a special one. She’s from Eastern Europe, and as you might expect has the penchant for hunting mushrooms that so many people from the region do, but with a few differences from some of the others I’ve ran into in the…
Wilted Amaranth, Chesnok Garlic and Summer Wild Mushrooms
I’ve been eating more and more amaranth in the past few years, for some reason I forgot I could wilt it like spinach. For a year or two all I did was put it in salads, and then it needs to be blended with other greens. If you use it raw, it can be a…
Wild Mushroom Sourdough
When I first started to be interested in mushrooms I remember reading somewhere that pioneers, out of desperation, would make a sort of bread from puffballs. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to make, or just taste, bread made with wild mushrooms. There was only problem: I had no idea how to make bread. As fate…