Cooked puffball mushrooms have a soft texture that some people don’t like, but there’s a lot more that you can do with those giant white orbs than toss them in a pan or bread and fry them. Jerky is one of the best things I’ve made with puffballs for people that don’t care for the…
Puffball
Puffballs are one of the most common, easy to identify wild mushrooms out there. If you're new to them, check out my intro to puffballs. If you're looking for recipes ideas, make sure to save some to make Puffball Powder. Puffball Lasagna is a crowd favorite, as are Classic Fried Puffballs.
Puffball and Squash Gratin with Goat Cheese
Wild mushrooms make fantastic gratins, which is probably evident in that there’s at least 3 separate mushroom gratins on this website. Gratin is a sort of loose word though, and each recipe I’ve put up is very different, since, at the end of the day, the word gratin itself just means baked. Think of gratin…
Puffball Parmesan
Besides fried puffballs, a good puff parmesan is a great thing to know how to make, especially in the Midwest where puffballs can be so abundant. It’s pretty simple: take some crisp fried puffballs, layer them in a pan with homemade tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, more tomato, a drizzle of white sauce or bechamel and…
Puffball Ragu
A great way to cook your puffballs that just about anyone who likes a good bowl of pasta will enjoy is adding them to a simple ragu or wild mushroom pasta sauce. Puffballs are often really large, and can be a little cumbersome to work with. Slicing them into big, chunky steaks is a good,…
Puffball Alfredo
Puffball parmesan sauce (Alfredo) is inspired by the prison-batch size amounts of alfredo sauce base I used to make in one of the first kitchens I worked in, differing in that it ends in a product I’d actually eat. The alfredo sauce was a staple of the little steakhouse in the small town I started…
Puffball Mushroom Bratwurst
Here’s a fun way to use meat, and dried mushroom powder, specifically puffballs. In charcuterie and sausage making, milk powder is often used, especially in finely ground emulsions like bologna and hot dogs to achieve a nice, bouncy texture. Here, instead of using milk powder in the sausages, I use toasted, dried puffball powder, which…
Puffball Mushroom Lasagna
Puffballs can be tricky to work with. Sauteing them can get oily and heavy fast, and not browning them, well, is just not going to taste good at all. One of my favorite things to do is to cook slices of the mushroom and use like sheets of fresh pasta. So far, I’ve really enjoyed…
Puffball Hummus
My new job is happily devouring my life, so I only managed to engineer *one* new recipe with puffballs this year, but it’s a great one: puffball hummus. Last year I shared a recipe for a caramelized puree of puffballs that allows you to concentrate their flavor and compress them into a small size that’s…
