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.
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