Yellowfoot chanterelles are a great, underused cousin compared to golden chanterelles and black trumpets, and while many of them are small, sometimes the ones sold out of the Pacific Northwest can be just as large, if not larger than some of the golden chanterelles and black trumpets I harvest in the Midwest. I made these…
Chanterelles
Cantharellus phasmatis, (pictured from Minnesota) is one of the finest mushrooms in the world.
Chanterelles and their friends: various types of golden chanterelles, yellowfoot chanterelles, black trumpets, red chanterelles, and others. If you're new to chants, check out my basic guide to golden chanterelles. If you have some you'd like to cook, try them wet sauteed, or in just about any wild mushroom recipe on this website, especially mushrooms cooked with garlic and parsley and in a simple chanterelle pasta.
Fermented Mushroom Pierogi
Fermented mushroom pierogi, along with a few different sauces I’ve made (dryad saddle shoyu/soy sauce) are the most delicious things I’ve made with fermented mushrooms yet. Fermented mushrooms are a concentrate, they’re not something I’m going to go and just eat out of a jar, especially if they’ve been long-fermented and have turned soft. The…
Wild Mushroom Chowder
A good, simple chowder made with wild mushrooms has been a reader request for a while here that I finally got around to posting. It comes together in just under an hour, and is a good way to use some fresh or dried wild mushrooms if you need a bowl of comfort food. A soup…
Yellowfoot Chanterelle Lefse
When I think of the cuisine of my Nordic ancestors, I don’t usually think of mushrooms, and that’s a mistake. Scandinavia is home to many similar varieties of mushrooms that we have in the Midwest: chanterelles, murklor, and even matsutake! Lefse with chanterelles, sauerkraut, and hushallsost cheese is one of the most delicious examples of…
Meatloaf Steaks with Hedgehog Mushroom Sauce
Tender slices of poached meatloaf, napped with handfuls of hedgehog mushrooms in a sauce spiked with paprika and lemon is what happens when you were trained to cook like a French chef, but TV dinners helped raise you. I came up with this to showoff how much fun hedgehog mushrooms can be. Hedgehogs have a…
Hedgehog Mushroom Soup with Beans, Watercress and Tomato
I love hedgehog mushrooms (especially the giant ones) but during the off-season here in Minnesota I sometimes cook with the smaller Hydnum umbillicatum that are sold commercially out of the PNW during our winter when I have a craving for fresh mushrooms. Hedgehogs are great in just about anything you’d add them to, but I love…
Chanterelle Spaghetti with Roasted Garlic-Wine Sauce
Earlier this year my former chef, friend, and mentor Chef Andy Lilja gave me a ring during chanterelle season to tell me how awesome his dinner was. Some of my favorite recipes are those from my chef friends, either restaurant staples, or things that they make at home, and I keep track of them whenever…
Mushroom Fricasee Fredy Girardet
Old cookbooks are a wealth of knowledge. Back in the day, it didn’t matter how many art directors were on set for the photo shoot, and how many different plate props you had, good food was just good food. One of my favorite old books is Fredy Girardet, a famous Swiss chef who reached the…
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…
Cooking Wild Mushrooms with the Wet Saute
A while ago a video on cooking mushrooms started circulating in the online community that turned a lot of heads, at least in my world. In a nutshell, the video discussed the benefits in depth (see the video) of adding water to mushrooms before they’re sautéed. At first, I thought l “ok science guy, the…
Scallopini with Pickled Wild Mushrooms and Brown Butter
I tell people over and over to make mushroom conserve when they have a great harvest of small buttons, especially chanterelles: golden chanterelles, hedgehogs, blue chanterelles especially, although lobster mushrooms and polypores like chickens, hens, and Ischnoderma work good too. See the master recipe for mushroom conserve here. The reason isn’t because I eat pickled…
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,…
Wild Mushroom Fermentation
I fermented my first wild mushrooms about 7 or 8 years ago. Every cook has stages they go through as they learn, and fermentation, at that point in time, was my obsession. Similarly, another cook where I worked was fixated on candying things, all the things: carrots, jalapeños—you name it, if it could fit in…