The Fungal Gourmet - Recap

The world, Alton reveals, holds no shortage of edible oddities. In Peru folks roast guinea pigs; in Zanzibar they make ant pies. Asians enjoy bird’s nest soup and Alton assures us that if we knew the original purpose of tacos we would never look at a bait shop the same way again. But one of the weirdest foods of all might be lurking in your refrigerator or your backyard: mushrooms. Yet with the right care and cooking they’re welcome citizens in that zone we call... Good Eats!

Mushrooms have more in common with apples than athlete’s foot since they are fruiting bodies – see delivery mechanisms. They grow from a subterranean part called a mycelium, sort of an underground tree that can live for a hundred years and reach sizes of an acre or more. In a real sense mushrooms are among the largest living creatures.

Mushrooms, like other produce, continue to breathe post harvest. But unlike some other foods, they don’t like holding their breath. But they dry out easily, too. Sealed in plastic mushrooms sweat their way to gooeyness in hours. Left unpackaged they dry out. Alton’s answer is a paper bag. It holds onto moisture while letting air through. Mushrooms in a paper bag will keep three or four days in the refrigerator. Alton advises those who leave their mushrooms in the store packaging to at least poke a few holes.

Don’t wash your mushrooms, Alton continues, until you are ready to cook. Suddenly, a Mad French Chef appears! He believes mushrooms must never touch water lest they become waterlogged and inedible. He uses a brush to gently clean his fungi.

Alton sets out to see whether mushrooms really will waterlog. He believes there is already so much water in a mushroom that it would require prolonged exposure to waterlog. The Mad French Chef disagrees vehemently. Alton offers him an assistant to squawk at. Then Alton weighs his own mushrooms; they weigh thirty-two ounces. Alton washes his, while the Mad French Chef and his assistant brush theirs.

Alton finishes an hour before the Mad French Chef. And the scale tells the tale: Alton’s mushrooms now weigh thirty-four ounces. They have absorbed two ounces of water, hardly enough to waterlog them. Worse, Alton finds a speck of dirt on the Mad French Chef’s ‘shrooms!

Food scribes once classified the mushroom as vegetable meat. They were off the mark botanically but dead accurate from the culinary perspective. Alton recommends the same cooking techniques that work well for meat: hot, fast cooking methods like broiling, roasting and sautéing.

The word sauté, we learn, means “jump” in the French language. Small, uniform pieces of food cook in a little bit of fat and a very hot pan. The cook must keep the moving (or jumping) throughout the process). To achieve uniformity one might practice with a knife, or one might use Alton’s approach: an egg slicer that yields even quarter inch thick slices.

Next Alton gets out a heavy pan and puts it over high heat. Cast iron works well but Alton uses stainless steel here to make his demonstration easier to see. His traditional sauté pan has high straight sides to keep food in and maximize the heated surface area.

Alton contemplates the right fat. He needs a high smoke point and good flavor. Olive oil or bacon drippings would work but for the best flavor Alton chooses butter. Butter has a relatively low smoke point, due to the dissolved milk solids. In the span of a single breath Alton explains how to clarify the butter; this process removes these solids and greatly raises the smoke point. The idea is to heat the butter and then extract the congealed solids by filtering, or by adding hot tap water and permitting the butter to cool and solidify; the solid butter contains no milk solids.

Now that he has his fat, Alton starts the sauté. Overcrowding ruins a sauté, Alton says. Food that doesn’t touch the pan cannot brown, and browning yields the delicious crust and savory flavor science still cannot explain. Alton keeps the food moving but avoids tricky pan moves that cause the food to leave the surface of the pan: food in midair stops cooking unless in the oven. When the mushrooms start to sizzle, Alton explains that this sound means water is leaving the food and evaporating immediately. When the mushrooms start to get a brown color Alton pushes them to the edge of the pan and adds more in the clear spot at the middle, repeating as necessary to sauté all of the mushrooms. As the food around the edge piles up and the clearing shrinks, Alton adds smaller quantities. He fights the desire to turn the heat down; as long as he can here sizzling he knows moisture remains in the mushrooms. When the sizzling stops the mushrooms can burn, but not until. As a final step Alton adds salt (adding it at this point ensures all the mushrooms get some) and makes one last clearing to add some shallots for flavor.

The pan has darkened with fond – caramelized bits of mushroom, fat and shallot. Alton adds a jigger of cognac to deglaze this (in this case, while the mushrooms remain in the pan – normally, deglazing occurs after the cooked food has been removed from the pan). He scrapes this around, building the sauce and coating the mushrooms with it in one step. Finally he finishes the mushrooms with a few chives and some pepper.

Versatile sautéed mushrooms work well as a side dish and may also form the basis of soups, meatloafs and other dishes. Any mushroom that does not have a thick woody stem may be sautéed.

Shitake mushrooms grow not in the ground but on logs – their name means “log grown” in Japanese. Because it takes a long time for such logs to grow a good crop, growers have created fake logs from chips with spores and food incorporated, changing the time to maturity from years to weeks.

Alton sautés his shitake mushrooms and then turns them into a paste by adding some heavy cream and some parmesan cheese. The heavy cream contains less moisture and the cheese contains proteins that uncoil and reach for other components when they heat. For flavor he adds dried tarragon and then removes it from the heat. To bind it, he sprinkles enough bread crumbs to cover it and then stirs these in. The shape (many points like pitons) and absorbency mean bread crumbs are well suited for this task.

Now Alton has a paste but nothing to fill with it. As the camera settles on some large white mushroom caps, Alton first dismisses the idea. Mushrooms filling mushrooms seems like crazy talk. Plus the paste has been cooked and the caps are raw. But the caps do have that nice void where the stem attached... Alton decides to roast the caps before he fills them. He puts ten or so in a bowl and drizzles with oil, tossing to coat. Then he adds some rosemary, some thyme, and some crushed garlic and lays them out on a rack over a half sheet pan, then slides that into a 350° oven. These won’t take look to cook; Alton keeps a close eye on the oven. He’s waiting until the tip of a paring knife slides easily in and out of the cap – ten minutes or less.

Alton fills each cap with about a tablespoon of the paste, avoiding tightly packing it – that would lead to slow cooking and poor texture. Then a few bread crumbs to form a crust and take color from the broiler. These broil just until the filling bubbles and the top browns. Timing is no good; carefully watch these!

Faster harvesting and tag team delivery means mushrooms arrive at the store more quickly. But it still pays to be vigilante; Alton offers some tips. Don’t assume loose mushrooms are fresher than the packaged sort; these really depends on how fast the store sells each type, for those are the ones restocked most often. Avoid packages showing condensation inside or mushrooms that aren’t refrigerated or are under the mist jets. As for pre-sliced? Alton wryly comments that quality and convenience are rarely seen holding hands...

Foraging for mushrooms can be fun, but also dangerous. There are many varieties containing potent toxins, including some that can irreversibly damage the liver, resulting in death or permanent disability. Take the time and learn, go with an expert, or you’re playing botanical Russian roulette, and you might as well set a table for Joe Black (as Alton mentions this, a grinning skull-capped figure appears behind him).

Mushrooms contain riboflavin, potassium and glutamic acid. They turn up the flavors of foods cooked with them. So the next time a porcini pops up in your yard (the grinning Grim Reaper appears again)... make that, your supermarket, take advantage.

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