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
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 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 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…
Classic Fried Puffballs
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….
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…
Puffball 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…
Puffball Ravioli, Mushrooms, Kale, And Sage Butter
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…
Puffball Parisienne 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…
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,…
Dried Puffball 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…