Friday Fungus: mushroom cocktails - well why not!

We know we can serve you mushrooms for every course but now we have the recipe to serve you mushroom-based cocktails like this one from Absolutely Fungulous:

A group of us went to a very Communist-era bunker-style bar called Lounge Bohemia in Shoreditch, where they had the most exceptional variety of cocktails. Imagine my delight when I saw the "porcini-tini" on the menu! A cocktail made of porcini mushrooms, vodka, crème de cacao, condensed milk and salt. An unlikely match made in heaven. It was delicious.

So there you are - mushroom cocktails!  And there are others playing with the divine flavours of fungi in their drinks:

For the sweet and salty Jishin, or "earthquake," made with a bourbon base and finished with a salted almond rim, Haney turns to mushrooms. (His father is a longtime member of a mycological association.) Haney boils candy cap mushrooms to remove their toxins, then infuses them in a syrup. The treated fungi taste remarkably like maple syrup.

A bit more fiddly but pretty exiting (perhaps best not done at home though).


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Friday Fungus: Some boletes for you to drool over...

You cook these gently in a pan with good olive oil, a little salt, some crushed black pepper and a little thyme. Don't listen to those philistines and fools who think garlic might help. It doesn't - the porcini taste is killed by garlic (unlike field mushrooms).

Serve with warm, fresh ciabatta.

Food for the gods!!

Friday Fungus: Warm Porcini Salad

These fresh porcini - can't you just smell them - were photographed at Radda-in-Chianti during late September. Early days for the harvest in truth (and they may have been shipped in from further north in Italy or higher in the hills) but they are glorious mushrooms - almost without peer when it comes to versatility & flavour. With these (or a couple of them as they're bloody expensive to buy) we are going to make - as they say on the telly - a warm salad.

You'll need:

2 good sized fresh porcini

A couple of those chunky red shallots or a small red onion

Some thyme, some sage and rosemary

Olive oil

Salt & black pepper

Fresh leaves, tomatoes and cucumber for the salad

Ciabatta

Slice the porcini - not too thinly as it loses bulk in the cooking, chop the shallots or onions and tear up the herbs.

Heat some oil in a heavy-bottomed pan (with a lid) and, when hot, soften the shallots. Add the porcini, herbs, salt and pepper, stir and cook for about 3 or 4 minutes. Cover the pan tightly and turn of the heat leaving to stand on the hob - will carry on softening and cooking.

Prepare a simple salad of leaves, cucumber and tomato. Dress a plate with a salad, uncover the cooked porcini and service on the salad with slices of ciabatta.

Friday Fungus: why we like mushrooms

A non-mushroom eater (all the more for me!) asked me why we eat mushrooms. Especially when so many are either unpleasant to eat or down right poisonous. Unfortunately I don't know - except to show you the rather overexposed photo above taken at the grocers at Radda-in-Chianti. Imagine our hunter gatherer ancestors, wandering around central Italy when there it is - a great fat, brown pugeant porcini mushroom. Something as plump as that has to be food, doesn't it? And some of the older ceps have been nibbled by small animals (or even by the hairy wild pig we've been chasing) and we take a risk by seeing if it kills the dog! It doesn't and the rest is history.

Having tried the big plump porcini and found them good, our ancestor settled down (don't want to stray too far from the place where those glorious fungi grow) and tamed the pig. Which gave a great opportunity to test out all those other mushrooms growing in the forests - if they don't kill the pig we can eat them and if they taste good we eat them again! And the pig - or maybe the dog - turned up another joy by rootling up the truffle.

In truth fungi are an important part of the diet for many mammals:

"It's clear that fungi are a dominant food item for many species of small mammals, particularly among squirrels, mice, and voles, and, in Australia, among several groups of small marsupials, such as bettongs, potoroos, and rat-kangaroos. Some of the more notable fungivorous mammals include the California red-backed vole (Clethrionomys californicus) and the northern flying squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus), for whom over half their diet is from hypogeous fungi, and the long-footed potoroo* (Potorous longipes), who's diet is over 90% fungi." (from Mycoweb)

So mammals eat mushrooms and we're mammals - QED! And mushrooms are not without their nutritional value either (although, as the saying goes, should be consumed as part of a balanced diet - we aren't all potoroos!).