Archive for the ‘cooking’ Category

12 Jan

Wild Mushroom Experiments

Posted by wooddogs3 in Books worth reading, cooking, Ketogenic diet, mushrooms, recipe, Uncategorized, Vegetable dinners, wild food. Tagged: , , , , , , .

No, not that kind of mushroom and not that kind of experiment. I have been reading a wonderful new book, chef Chad Hyatt’s The Mushroom Hunter’s Kitchen, and it has led to compulsive kitchen experimenting. Hyatt writes about porcini, morels, and the other “premium” mushrooms, but also about more common mushrooms that you never encounter in upscale restaurants but might find a bagful of if you’re a mushroom hunter. He suggests substitutes where appropriate and encourages a lot of experimentation. He has me adding cooked ground black trumpet mushrooms to my umami sauce, and I’m especially interested by his mushroom leathers, in one case made from the Sullius mushroom genus that I no longer harvest because I dislike the texture so much. This makes the despised  mushroom sound worthy of a place in the take-home basket.

I happen to have a lot of lobster mushrooms in the freezer, because they are beautiful and plentiful and I can never resist harvesting them when I find them, but the unfortunate truth is that to my palate they have very little flavor at all. I love hummus, and as a low-carb person I can’t eat it often, so I was interested by Hyatt’s recipe for hummus made from salted mushrooms. I don’t have any salted mushrooms at hand currently, but I certainly do have lobsters.  They were sautéed in olive oil before freezing, and I decided to thaw a bag and try a recipe based on Hyatt’s. The lobsters went in the food processor, about 2 cups of them, with 1/4 cup of tahini, the juice of two small lemons, two cloves of raw garlic, and some additional olive oil. After a few minutes of processing and adding salt to taste, the taste was good but the texture and mouth feel were not at all what I wanted.  I moved the somewhat grainy lumpy mixture out of the processor and into my Vitamix blender, added more olive oil so that the mixture would blend, and blended it on the high setting, stirring the contents down a couple of times.   The texture was now exactly what I wanted, not totally smooth like baby food but with a texture much like chickpea hummus.  Dolloped into a bowl, sprinkled with ground chipotle chilies rather than the more traditional sumac, and garnished with chopped cilantro, it made a delicious spread. I should add that Hyatt calls for less olive oil than I ended up using, although I didn’t measure precisely.  I love the taste of top quality olive oil and lobster mushrooms have little natural flavor of their own, so for me this was a natural adjustment to make.

This first very successful experiment has me reading the book with renewed interest.  It can be rather painful to read mushroom books out of season, when there is no way to go out and find the mushrooms, but most of us who hunt mushrooms have a lot of frozen or dried  mushrooms from past successful hunts, and this can help us get busy and get them out of the pantry or freezer.  Also, specialty grocery stores have much larger selections than they used to. The last time I was in Whole Foods, I counted seven varieties of fresh mushrooms.  Buying those hideously expensive little packets of dried mushrooms from the grocery store is not really an option if you want mushrooms in bulk, but you can buy bulk dried mushrooms from several sources.  I usually use Oregon Mushrooms or buy from private foragers when I want to augment my pantry supply. By the way, know your forager. Not every forager should be trusted blindly.

In short, if you like to eat mushrooms at all, I highly recommend Hyatt’s book, whether or not you are a mushroom hunter. His creativity is wonderful.   For example, there is an entire chapter of mushroom desserts.  This is not a category of possibilities that I ever gave the faintest thought to, but the recipes look really good and seem designed to get cooks thinking. And this, to me, is the hallmark of a really successful cookbook. A good cookbook may give me a few recipes that I use verbatim, but it’s more important that it gets me excited about the endless vagaries of food and leaves me feeling that there are more possibilities than I’ve considered. Lifting simple nourishment and avoidance of starvation to an art form is what cooks do, and a good cookbook can get us very jazzed about doing it.

Keep in mind that the book has some very useful notes about lesser-known edibles but is a cookbook, not a foraging book. You will still need a field guide (and some good teachers) if you’re new to the sport.

Hyatt is selling his book directly, in both hard copy and ebook format, at the link above. As always, I don’t accept review copies. Books that I review are bought at the price that you will pay. This one is worth every penny.

1 Jan

Fermentation VII: Umami Sauce

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, fermentation, home food production, recipe, Uncategorized, urban homesteading. Tagged: , , , .

At the beginning of the year I like to look back on what worked last year and what is still with me. My major category of experiments this fall and winter was fermentation, and this rich dark meaty sauce paste which incorporates multiple fermented ingredients is one of the clear winners. I try to keep some in the fridge at all times because it’s really useful stuff.

The foundation is black garlic.  I have come to love black garlic with passionate intensity, and have also had to sadly admit that my own homemade version is not nearly as good as what I can get commercially.  I think the difference is the evenness of heat that can be kept in a commercial fermentation chamber, and a rigged rice cooker or slow cooker just doesn’t work as well.  One day, no doubt, I will find a safe way to build a fermentation chamber that holds 140°. In the meantime, I buy it from the sources mentioned in my black garlic post.

To make the sauce paste pound three of the large Korean style single cloves of garlic or the peeled cloves from one head of regular black garlic with a generous pinch of salt in a mortar and pestle. This supposes that you have one of the big Thai ones meant for ingredients, not the tiny things meant for spices. Keep pounding until the paste is smooth. Pound in a tablespoon of butter, avocado oil, or olive oil. When this is smoothly incorporated, pound in a couple of tablespoons of of lacto-fermented cremini mushrooms and their juice (read more here.) When the paste is smooth again, stir in a tease of colatura or Red Boat fish sauce (I use t teaspoons,) a tablespoon of good red wine vinegar and one tablespoon of your own best balsamic-type vinegar (I use my Concord-must vinegar) or high-quality commercial balsamic vinegar (no grocery-store stuff.) Taste for salt and for acid balance, and adjust as needed. You can double or triple the recipe as long as your mortar is big enough.

Now you have a number of possibilities. The paste can be used as is, making sure it’s brought to room temp if you used butter, and can be stirred into soup or eggs or spread on buttered toast or grilled polenta for a tasty side. A spoonful lends distinction to a mug of hot sipping broth. A fewspoonfools are really good tossed into greens at the last minute of cooking. Just don’t be timid with it. The flavors are rich but surprisingly understated. It keeps in the refrigerator for at least a week if tightly covered.

 

It can be thinned to a more sauce-like consistency with a little broth or a little more oil and poured over hot or cold sliced meat.

My favorite elaboration is, when pounding in the butter, to keep pounding in more, up to four or five tablespoons instead of just one. If you pound enough this creates a smooth mousse, into which the rest of the ingredients can be stirred. It’s superb as steak butter, wonderful on sourdough bread, great spread on a thick slice of Manchego cheese, and I can easily imagine it dolloped  over a plate of hot pan-grilled shrimp. I think it would be great as a topping for broiled salmon, and can imagine it lending a deep meaty flavor to roasted or grilled vegetables.

It has become one of the things that I have to have around, and I’m always thrilled when I find things like that.

Happy 2019!

31 Dec

Fermentation VI: Lacto-fermentation

Posted by wooddogs3 in Books worth reading, cooking, fermentation, home food production, kitchen staples, mushrooms, preserving, urban homesteading. Tagged: , , , .

I can’t say enough about how The Noma Guide to Fermentation is livening up my kitchen experiments, but I was fairly sure that I wouldn’t care much for ordinary lacto-fermentation. All fermented pickles and sauerkraut are made by this method, and with the exception of kimchi I’ve never really taken to any of them. But then I bought a couple of pounds of organic cremini mushrooms because they were on sale cheap and I’m a sucker for a bargain, and had to figure out something to do with them. I tried slicing them, tossing with 4% of their weight in salt, and packing into quart mason jars under pickle weights. I set them aside loosely covered, and when I next paid attention to them a week later the mushrooms had shrunk down by half and the jars were filled with fluid. I sniffed the contents, and was surprised at the strong mushroom aroma. I tasted the fluid and it was salty and had a full mushroom flavor. So I started to experiment.

This soup also contains other recent and past experiments.  If there is one thing that I want readers of my blog to do, it is play with their food. Taste, and if the tastes go well together, it doesn’t matter  whether you ever saw a recipe quite like it before.  The flavor of mushrooms and black garlic seem made for each other, and I wanted to try the combination out. I put about a cup of dried porcini slices in hot water to soak. While they soaked, I started the cooking with two cloves of fresh garlic finely minced and eight peeled cloves of black garlic chopped very coarsely. I melted a couple of tablespoons of butter in a saucepan, and added the two garlic types and three slices of bacon sliced 1/4” wide. I sautéed these ingredients slowly over medium heat until the fresh garlic was cooked but not yet coloring, and added a quart of very good chicken broth, the soaked porcinis and their strained soaking water, half a cup of the fermented creminis and their fluid, and a tablespoon of dry sherry and two teaspoons of Red Boat fish sauce. This mixture was brought to a slow boil, and turned down to a simmer for 20 minutes. Meanwhile I peeled another eight cloves of black garlic and pounded them to a smooth paste with a good pinch of salt. When smooth, I pounded in a tablespoon of fermented mushroom liquid, a tablespoon of boiled-down kombucha,  and a tablespoon of red wine vinegar. When the soup was served, a good dollop of this paste was put in each bowl, to be stirred in by the diner. Of course you could just add it to the soup in the pot, but the pleasure of smelling the rich, complex fragrance as the paste melts into the soup would then be lost to all but the cook.

Be aware that lacto-fermentation only preserves food up to a point. After a week fermenting on the counter, the cremini juice is at peak flavor in my opinion. If left at room temp it may go on to develop musty off-flavors. In my kitchen, at the one-week point it goes in the fridge.

I always use quart wide-mouth mason jars for lacto-fermenting. There are wonderful crocks made especially for the purpose, but I don’t want that much of any one product, so I stick with my jars. Good pickle weights will simplify your lacto-fermenting and help prevent mold. Good weights are glass, solid and heavy, smooth on the bottom, and have a handle on top so that you can get hold of them. Cheaper weights are often hollow on the bottom, creating an airspace that invites mold, and aren’t heavy enough to keep the fermenting veggies submerged. Good ones can be bought here or from other sources. I have one hand-thrown stoneware pickle weight that I love, and have also used smooth rounded rocks of the right size after putting them through the dishwasher. This last is unscientific and probably unsanitary but I bet our ancestors did it too.

 

30 Nov

Fermentation III: Vinegar

Posted by wooddogs3 in Books worth reading, cooking, edible landscaping, fermentation, fruit, home food production, kitchen staples, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

 
I first wrote about red wine vinegar in 2009, and while I have made and consumed it steadily since then, there didn’t seem to be much more to say about it. My husband gifted me with a marvelously cool 2 gallon oak barrel to keep it in, but the vinegar was the same. But then came The Noma Guide to Fermentation, and I’m left wondering why I was so unimaginative. Their chapter on vinegars has lots of interesting ideas but the ones that excite me the most are elderberry “balsamic” and black garlic “balsamic.” I suspect that I will end up combining the two, since I have some elderberry wine fermenting and the port-like notes should be a perfect complement to the deep umami of black garlic, and for even more depth I’ll use red wine vinegar to start the acetic fermentation. Basically, if you have a good strong vinegar mother, you can ferment anything mildly alcoholic into vinegar. The acetobacter bacillus converts ethanol to acetic acid in the presence of oxygen, so if you want to use your own fruit you need to ferment it into wine first, but that’s easy enough. Once you have wine or mead or hard cider to ferment into vinegar, you can do it in quart mason jars, with a dish towel tied tightly over the top to allow oxygen in and prevent winged visitors, and make several kinds of vinegar in a square foot of counter space. Or if you have a lot of ideas and a tolerant spouse, you can occupy all available surfaces. Just make sure you have a plan for what to do with it.  You can cook with it as detailed in my 2009 post, and if you still have too much it makes a fair non-alcoholic drink stirred into sparkling water. Stir a shot into a tall glass of chilled sparkling water, with some natural or artificial sweetener. I like a shake of cinnamon on top. This isn’t a kid’s drink, and only the adults are likely to enjoy it, and not all of them by any means. Some will dislike the sharp edge, and a dash of fruit juice or a little honey may take the curse off for them. But those of us who drank the old cider-vinegar-and-honey drink growing up generally came to enjoy the sweet-sour flavor and like this use of vinegar.

This is already known to everyone, but it bears occasional repeating: you can also infuse vinegar with nearly anything that suits your fancy. Tarragon is a classic, but I prefer thyme infused in red wine vinegar, using about one big bunch of thyme per pint of vinegar. Flavorful fruits are also a possibility. Be aware that Acetobacter does one thing superbly well, and that is converting ethanol to acetic acid. If you add any source of unfermented sugar directly to your ferment, it will remain as sugar. You can use this effect deliberately to make fascinating semi-sweet or agrodolce vinegars. One that I particularly enjoyed was made by dehydrating Concord grapes from my vine until they were somewhat shriveled and approaching the raisin stage, covering them with red wine vinegar, blending with a stick blender until the grapes were roughly chopped, and then infusing the mixture for a couple of weeks. The grape bits were then strained out, and the vinegar was richly flavored, barely sweet, and carried some of the unique tang of the Concord grape. I’m looking forward to making pomegranate vinegar in the near future. Blackberry vinegar would probably be wonderful.

It may be that live vinegar contributes to your biome and general health, and definitely it contains the antioxidants of the original wine with little or none of the alcohol.

If you get interested in culinary uses for your vinegar, you will enjoy Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat. The section on acid in cooking is invaluable and will lead you to analyze food that lies a bit too heavy on the tongue and realize that a bit of acid could have sparked it to deliciousness. Canal House makes and uses a lot of vinegar in their cooking, and you can find some recipes and a good article on making vinegar here.

The vinegar “mother” is a great example of a SCOBY or pellicle, a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast that create a matrix and keep reproducing as long as they have a food supply. They busily make vinegar, kombucha,water or milk kefir, or other things depending on the particular microorganisms. You can see the vinegar mother well in this borrowed shot:

Your mother is very versatile and can make vinegar of anything alcoholic as long as the proof isn’t too high. Be aware that a mother formed in red wine will carry red pigment for quite a while, and if you put it in white wine or hard cider you will have rose’ vinegar. The mothers look a bit like placentas:

If you have a healthy one, the question always arises of what to do with the “pups” or new layers of mother that are continually forming. Some people eat them, but then some people eat their own placentas. No judgement implied, but I wouldn’t eat either one. If your friends don’t want one, put it in the compost or bury it in the garden or whatever makes you feel okay about letting go of it.

 

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