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Puffball

Slicing a giant puffball mushroom
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 Mushroom Bratwurst

https://foragerchef.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Lamb-and-puffball-brats-3.jpg

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…

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Puffball Mushroom Lasagna

puffball mushroom lasagna recipe

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…

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Puffball Hummus

puffball mushroom 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…

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Classic Fried Puffballs

Fried Puffball Mushrooms

If you’ve found a puffball mushroom before and you haven’t had them fried yet (the classic way), grab some flour, egg, and breadcrumbs and get to work next time you come score one. Puffballs can be delicious, but I’ve found that some people get turned off at the texture, which can be a little soft….

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Caramelized Puffball Puree

Caramelized Puffball Puree

Generally speaking puffballs are large, very large. Most of them that I find can’t even be put in a refrigerator.  I luck out since I have giant walk in coolers where storing food of any size is no problem at all. At home this poses an obstacle though. I have lots of friends that hunt…

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Puffball Caviar

Puffball Mushroom Caviar

Reading Jean Louis Palladin was when I first saw the importance of language in writing a menu. It’s a tangent from our puffball recipe, but my favorite example is how he described cooked testicles to diners. If he knew them, he told them they were sweet breads, if he didn’t know them, he told them…

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Puffball Ravioli, Mushrooms, Kale, And Sage Butter

puffball mushroom ravioli with maitake, hygrophorus russula, and hedgehog mushrooms

After an unsuccessful search for a big hen of the woods in my best patch, I was bent on coming back with something, any old thing, since no hunter likes to go home empty handed, and my free time to hunt is pretty limited these days. That something ended up being a little handful of…

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Puffball Parisienne Gnocchi

wild puffball mushroom gnocchi

It may not look like it, but this is a study in giant puffball mushrooms. Typically you see puffballs breaded and fried, but you can’t always have them fresh, so here is a fun recipe I dreamed up using powder made from their dried slices. Essentially, these are just puffball flavored dumplings made from a…

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Dried Puffball Mushroom Gravy

dried puffball mushroom gravy

There is a market connected to the restaurant that I work at. In the market we sell all sorts of things that our culinary team has created, homemade soups, fish fumet, meat glace, charcuterie and sausages, headcheese, and prosciutti that take 3 years to make. We have pickles of every color and variety: cucumbers, sunchokes,…

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Dried Puffball Powder

dried/dehydrated puffball mushroom powder

It was a great year for puffballs, right after it started to get cool we had a nice rainy spell and…POOF!, puffballs everywhere. One day of lucky hunting brought me around 30 lbs of perfect puffballs, with many more left in the woods since they were past their prime. I like eat puffballs fresh, and…

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Puffball Mushroom-Cheese Croquettes, With Ramp Ketchup

cheese stuffed puffball mushrooms with ramp ketchup.

Puffballs stuffed with cheese! Oh baby. There is just something about stuffing food with cheese that’s awesome. I know if I make anything like this orders will come in rapidly, I had better be dug in deeper than an Alabama tick with prepped food. There is just something about oowey-gooey cheese that humans have a natural…

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Puffball Mushrooms

Puffball Mushrooms

Even if you haven’t ever thought about eating one, you’ve probably seen these around, and likely kicked them as a child, I know I did growing up in the windy plains of Midwestern Minnesota. They’re easy to spot, generally very large, and pretty versatile in the kitchen. They also don’t have poisonous look a likes, if…

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🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Last entry. I’ve saved t 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Last entry. I’ve saved the smallest, fern gulliest plant for last. 

False Mermaid Weed (Floerkea proserpinacoides) is a good little plant Sam Thayer showed me. It’s tiny, as in all the photos are from me on my belly, in a wet ditch. It’s so small it’s hard to get the camera to even focus on it (see pic with my finger for scale). 

Mermaid weed likes wet areas, like ditches and spots that hold a bit of water (perfect mosquito habitat😁). 

Like chickweed, Floerkia greens are like nature’s Microgreens. They’re in the Limnanthaceae, (a new-ish group of brassicas) and like the Toothwort form earlier this week, you’ll taste a strong mustard-family flavor in a mouthful of their tender stems. 

They’re literally wild mustard sprouts, and, unlike other wild sprouts (garlic mustard 🤬) they stay sprouts, and, they actually taste good. 

It has a wide range over much of the eastern and western U.S., and is listed as secure globally, but is endangered in some states and shouldn’t be disturbed in those places. 

I’m lucky enough to have some large colonies near me so I do clip a few handfuls each year-my annual reward for removing some of the garlic mustard nearby, that, along with atvs, dirt bikes, and contamination from local water pollution, is one of the biggest threats to this tiny green. 

#floerkiaproserpinacoides 
#wildsprouts #mustardsprouts #ferngully #tiny #foraging #mermaid #🧜‍♀️
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Virginia Bluebells (Merten 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica) are one of the most beautiful harbingers of spring I know, as well as one of the most delicious. 

They’re in the Borage family, along with the namesake plant, Comfrey (which I only eat a few flowers of occasionally) and Honeywort. 

The flavor of the greens, like borage, has a rich flavor some people might describe as mushroomy or fishy, but after a just a few moments of cooking (30-60 seconds) they get mild and delicious, with a subtle bitterness. It’s a good bitter though-nothing like dandelions or garlic mustard that aren’t fit to be in the same basket, let alone on the same plate. 

The shoots are sweet and delicious, much more mild than the greens. As they can grow to be over a foot long, they’re almost more of a vegetable than a leafy green, depending on when you harvest them. 

Bluebells love moist, rich soil, but you don’t have to go to the woods to get them. Many people know Virginia Bluebells as a garden plant, and they can make a great edible addition to your landscape.

#virginiabluebells #foraging #ephemerals #springwildflowers #wildfoodlove #mertensiavirginica
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Narrow-leaved Wild Leek / 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Narrow-leaved Wild Leek / White Ramp (Allium burdickii) 

If you’re in a ramp patch you might occasionally see some with white stems (pic 1,2). These are a cousin to the more common variety with much larger leaves and red stems (pic 3,4,5)

Allium burdickii is not as common as the red-stemmed variety, and in every ramp patch I’ve been in, the white ramp is heavily outnumbered. 

Where I harvest, I like to leave them alone, and mark the areas where they grow with sticks or middens on the ground so I can go back in the fall and help them spread their seeds. I also try and remove garlic mustard when I see it-a much more imminent threat in my mind to ramps than foragers out to gather some leaves. 

2020 was a banner year for ramp seeds, and you can still help the plants right now (pic 7) as some seed heads are still full and would love for you to give them a shake as you walk by. 

#alliumburdickii #ramps #ephemerals #foraging #spring
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 #4: Erythronium leaves E 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

#4: Erythronium leaves 

Erythronium (Trout Lily) are another ephemeral that I see widespread in my ramp patches, there’s at least 32 species world-wide, with at least one endangered species in MN (Dwarf Trout Lily). 

They’re a beautiful, delicious plant I eat every year, but I can’t recommend serving them to the general public. Plenty of people say these are edible, but also emetic if eaten in “quantity”. 

I can tell you, at least with E. albidum and E. americanum I’ve eaten, that some people are much more sensitive than others, so if you want to make a salad to serve people, make sure they’re comfortable eating it, and use a few leaves as a garnish. 

Funny enough, I didn’t learn about these from a foraging book. Like knotweed, I learned about them from one of my favorite chefs: Michel Bras, one of the most influential chefs of the turn of the 21 century. 

Any chef that works with wild plants owes a debt to Bras. His book, although a little dated now, still teaches me new things all the time. While flipping through the book I also caught a recipe using tansy flowers 😳 that I’d probably pass on. 

The whitefish crusted with sunflower seeds is a dish of mine from 2012, and an example of how I eat the leaves: a few at a time, as a garnish. 

#troutlily #erythronium #michelbras #ephemerals #foraging
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Plant #3: Cutleaf Toothwor 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Plant #3: Cutleaf Toothwort (Cardamine concatenata) is another beautiful spring wildflower that loves to grow in the same habitat you’ll see ramps and spring beauty. 

Its small at first, but grows to a worthy size for eating as it flowers. It’s related to cabbage and mustard greens (Brassicaceae) and eating just a few leaves will give you a potent, spicy pop of mustard-family flavor reminiscent of horseradish. 

Eaten in combination with other things, like in a salad, the flavor becomes submissive and you’ll barely know it’s there. 

Some people eat the spicy roots shaped like canine teeth, but for the work I hardly think they’re worth it. 

A great wild spring green for the salad bowl-eat them leaves, tender stem, flowers and all🤤. 

#cutleaftoothwort #cadamineconcatenata #ephemeral #springedibles #foraging #wildfoodlove
🌱Ephemeral Week🌱 Plant #2 is Virginia water 🌱Ephemeral Week🌱

Plant #2 is Virginia waterleaf, and, I’m cheating a bit as it’s semi-ephemeral. The plant comes up in spring and goes to flower, but gives a second harvest of fresh growth in the fall, where other ephemerals I know do not. 

This is a great starter wild green-easy to recognize with the splashes of white on the leaves that may or may not be present. After you learn it though, don’t be surprised if, like me, you eventually pass it up for more delicious greens nearby. 

The plant gets tough quick, and the flavor is..meh, so I usually have small amounts of very young greens in blends of blanched and sautéed mixes. 

My favorite part is the wee flower buds, that, if you get at the right time, can be harvested in decent quantity and are good steamed as they’ll soak up oil sautéed. 

#hydrophyllumvirginianum #waterleaf #foraging #fueledbynature #weedeater
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