Porcini-O-Rama

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collage of porcini
Photo by Holly A. Heyser

One of my favorite things in the world is to gorge on a fresh, seasonal ingredient when it’s abundant. I eat tomatoes every day in August. I once binged on mackerel for several weeks straight in spring. And in April I eat so much asparagus my pee smells funny all month.

But there is nothing quite like a full-on gorge with an ingredient so fragile and so rare as a wild mushroom, in this case the spring porcini Holly and I found with Langdon Cook last week. These are the ingredients you can’t replace easily, so you want every bite to count.

We wound up with more than enough fresh porcini for three big meals after our trip, and I was hoping to make this a binge to remember.

I’ve cooked with spring porcini before. A year ago, I made a raw porcini salad, I lacquered them in a saute pan and then chopped the stems and other bits for a mushroom ragout I served with polenta.

But last year I failed to write down the recipe for both the raw porcini salad and the lacquered porcini — and both were pretty awesome. So I remade both recipes.

raw porcini salad
Photo by Holly A. Heyser

Porcini are one of the few wild mushrooms you can eat raw, and I like their slightly crunchy texture here. Spring porcini taste milder than fall ones, so I used a light hand with an oregano-lemon vinaigrette to dress it. The dish still lacked a bass note, however, so I julienned some cured lamb loin and tossed it in with the porcini. Much better. Incidentally, you can do this recipe with regular button mushrooms, too.

The lacquered porcini are based off a recipe for glazed enoki mushrooms I’d found in Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art. Only I went with Western flavors: Butter and a sweet wine.

I kinda feel dirty for which wine I chose, too — I used a splash of a 1974 Heitz Cellars Angelica. I got the wine when I was researching Angelica for Gastronomica magazine, and it is very special, as only a sweet, 30-year-old oxidized wine could be. I have no idea how expensive it is, but using it in a pan sauce felt like wiping my ass with $100 bills. Someday I might just have to do that to see how it feels; I’m betting scratchy.

The recipe for laquered porcini is ridiculously simple, and can be done with lesser mushrooms and lesser wine. Cremini and Marsala would be what I’d suggest as cheaper substitutes.

Photo by Holly A. Heyser

Lang says he likes to grill his porcini, and I reckoned Lang would know — he eats way more of them than I do. We also came home with some morels, but not really enough to make a meal in and of themselves. So I decided on an encore performance of the morel sauce I served with venison a couple weeks ago, only using grilled porcini as the stand-in for the venison.

grilled porcini
Photo by Holly A. Heyser

Holly really outdid herself on this one; I can just stare at this picture for hours. The porcini take on a meaty texture when grilled, but they’re still pretty mild. The morel sauce, made with Port wine, demi-glace and shallots, adds weight to the dish. It is always a big-time drool fest when I bring this sauce out, and we could’ve eaten every one of the porcini this way and been perfectly happy.

But I had another idea. Anyone ever eat at Alinea, Chef Grant Achatz’s place in Chicago? No? Neither have I. A bit beyond my tax bracket. But I did buy Achatz’s book Alinea, which is as daunting as his food. My friend Carol Blymire is cooking her way through this book, and her adventures in molecular gastronomy are one of my guilty-pleasure reads every week.

Well not long ago, she decided to reconstruct one of Achatz’s dishes into a form most of us mere mortals can understand. Her reasoning? A complete dish in the Alinea cookbook consists of many elements, each one its own recipe — and many of those component recipes rock the effing house. Carol and I talked about it, and we both think that for most home cooks, it’s wrong to focus on the whole dish — you’ll throw up your hands. Make the component recipes and play with them that way.

So I did. I took elements from the porcini recipes in Achatz’s Alinea, with almonds and cherries, and reinvented it in a dish I’d be proud to serve Chef Achatz himself, if I were ever so lucky to be able to cook for him.

sous vide venison with porcini puree and cherries
Photo by Holly A. Heyser

What is it? If I had to name this dish, it’d something crazy, like “Venison Comes to a Sudden Stop for Porcini.” Sounds all modern art, doesn’t it? No, really, you’re asking: What the hell is in it?

  • It is venison loin I massaged with one of my favorite new ingredients, Oregon White Truffle Oil (I got my bottle from Jack Czarnecki, who invented it), then cooked sous vide. When the meat came out, I rolled it in porcini powder.
  • The sauce is straight from Alinea’s porcini puree, although I used more garlic and thyme than Achatz does.
  • The compote/salsa/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is also based on the Alinea porcini dish, only I used hazelnuts instead of almonds; I get bored with the classic cherry-almond combo sometimes. It’s porcini stems diced and sauteed, with stewed cherries and toasted hazelnuts, with a little fresh thyme thrown in.

This dish was like slow sex: All your senses are afire, and you never want it to end. It’s the closest I’ve come to making a “death row” dish, and while I can’t quite say it’d be my last meal on earth, nor can I come up with anything I’d rather eat right now. Just thinking of this dish makes me all warm…

I got down off my high-wire act the next day and went from haute to homey. I still had a bit of porcini puree I had not already smeared all over my body, and I was wondering what I should do with it. Ravioli filling came to mind. Yeah, I know, probably not your first thought.

porcini ravioli
Photo by Holly A. Heyser

It gets better. I doubled down on porcini by adding some porcini powder to the pasta itself, which was half farro flour, fortified with a couple duck eggs I got from my friend Josh. In went the porcini puree, and I tossed the ravioli with more Oregon truffle oil, black pepper, and some wild California white sage.

porcini ravioli
Photo by Holly A. Heyser

Um, yes please! I am only sorry I did not have more fresh porcini to make a double batch, as we gobbled up every one in seconds, and in silence — well, except for grunts and monosyllabic yummy noises.

It was a fitting end to our fresh porcini bender. How many months before the fall porcini arrive? Sigh.

grilled porcini
Photo by Holly A. Heyser

PORCINI RECIPES:

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About Hank Shaw

Hey there. Welcome to Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, the internet’s largest source of recipes and know-how for wild foods. I am a chef, author, and yes, hunter, angler, gardener, forager and cook. Follow me on Instagram and on Facebook.

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15 Comments

  1. Hello,

    With regards to your “lacquered porcini mushroom” dish – you say you based it on a glazed enoki mushroom recipe in Shizuo Tsuji’s “Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art”, if I understand you correctly.

    For the life of me I cannot find such a recipe or variations on the theme thereof. There are recipes for baked, grilled, etc mushrooms including said enoki mushrooms, but not glazed. Would you be willing to cite the actual page or recipe you are referring to, please? (I have the 25th Anniversary Edition Copyright 2006)

    Thanks,

    chiaros.

  2. Hank,
    I friend referred me to your blog a couple of weeks ago and I love it. I find myself wandering back here whenever I’m browsing the net aimlessly.

    You end this posting with a yearning for fall boletes… Well, the fall boletes are up and in enormous abundance! I collected somewhere in the ballpark of 30 pounds yesterday and I’m always looking for new ways to prepare them. You need to get out there for some foraging because I would LOVE to see some more of your recipes! 🙂

    Thanks!

    – BA Forager

  3. A note for Kim at Rustic Garden Bistro–In So. Cal. we have the Los Angeles Mycological Society (www.lamushrooms.org), and its counterpart in San Diego. We had a Mother’s Day weekend morel foray and campout in the San Bernardino Mountains, since that was historically the peak of the very brief So. Cal. morel season. High hopes due to lots of snow pack over the winter–but we got skunked (40 people, 2 days…three little morels. Boo-hoo!). So, maybe next year…Anyhow, you might want to hook up with one of these groups to learn more about where and when to find edible mushrooms in So. Cal. It’s a really nice group of people, even without the ‘shrooms!

  4. We have managed to be skunked EVERY TIME we go out for porcini. Thankfully, we’ve got a pal here in town (SF) who is kind enough to soothe our frustrations with some of his (enviable) local bounty.

    I have about 3 lbs of dried morels (and the freezer’s full of chantarelles) from last year that I still need to use up, so I suppose I oughtn’t complain about this year’s mushroom luck.

    I think I’ll be thawing out some venison tenderloin this week. Tell me, do you stew your own cherries, and if so, in what? We always wind up with too many cherries and I’d love to put some up this year for recipes like this one.

  5. I spent a fall semester in Rome – right during porcini season – and just thinking about porcini risotto and ravioli is enough to make me salivate. (“Venison Comes to a Sudden Stop” is doing a pretty good job on that front, too.)

    I do have some porcini powder in my spice cabinet – I’ll have to try adding it to pasta sometime.

  6. Mari: Thanks! I’ve heard that from a lot of fellow foragers back East. I am OK with being the harbinger of wild edibles to come…

    Matt: Oh I know! I normally hate the dreaded “shit stain” presentation, but my original presentation looked even worse. Sometimes ya gotta go with the skid mark. Sigh.

  7. Lovely looking food there mate. Even if you did the dreaded brown sauce “plate skid” presentation! I shall now always use the term “wiping my ass with $100 bills”.

    Great food and writing mate.

  8. Please don’t stop blogging!! As a foraging newbie I often don’t know when to expect various plants to be ready. I live in Michigan so I’m a few weeks behind you. Your blog is perfect! When you blog about a plant I have a week or 2 to get my act together to go on the lookout. I would be clueless without your head’s up.

    Thank you so much!

  9. Kim: Thanks! No idea about porcini or morels in SoCal. I would look in the hills a week after the first rains. Morels I’d look in maybe March. Porcini you might find in November. David Arora’s book will let you know more…

  10. Hi Hank:

    I don’t plan to get to my three strikes, but if I do… I would have this as my last meal. Wow – way to go with duck eggs and porcini powder in the dough.

    Any suggestions on where I could forage for my own porcinis or morels in Southern CA? Is that even possible?!?!?! I’d feel more legit if I could forage for some to make these awesome-lookin’ raviolis. 😉 In the meantime, I’m stuck foraging for wild arugula in the yard. …sigh…

  11. Ken: We should look for spring porcini on the East Side of the Cascades, which terminate at Shasta. The McCloud area is supposed to be good.

    Dawn: LOL. I’ll have what she’s having…

    Philandlauren: Thanks! It tasted just as good as it looked.

  12. Bravo. One of the most beautiful food pic subjects is caramelized porcini, if done right, and they are here. Our farmer market mushroom stand is often pretty thin but we’re excited when we see porcini. Absolutely great post.

  13. Heart beating fast, eyes wide, yes… Yes… YES! To these mushroom dishes, that is. 😉

  14. I have been to Alinea, and I think this would fit on the menu nicely. Maybe half the portion, on a stranger plate, with someone hovering over you spraying porcini essence over your head. Sure.

    The mushroom man at the Stockton farmer’s market was in rare form yesterday. Gorgeous honking procini. I bought some beautiful morels, and when I asked where he got them, he said the Sierras. And when I asked specifically where he said Shasta. And then something else I’ve never heard of. Is that subterfuge, or what?