A Fungus Among Us

[Jenise]

Honestly, just any excuse to eat that noodle pancake!

I've been meaning to get back to this thread for a while.

I'm very interested in the following advice: The topic is pan-frying chanterelles. A lot of people, myself included, just get the pan very hot so as to evaporate any moisture they weep. But Joel Robuchon, and several other food experts, say that you get a superior result if you first plunge the whole mushrooms into boiling water for 20 seconds, dry them off with a towel, then slice and saute.

Has anybody tried this?

I suppose I should but I see fresh chanterelles only rarely. (However, I do have a source of some extremely fruity dried ones... no, I didn't expect much but I was both surprised and pleased!)

// Here's the Robuchon quote: "A lot of cooks don't know how to prepare mushrooms properly. It looks simple, but it's not. For porcinis, most think you have to cook them at a high heat. You have to take your time in cooking them, in a medium heat. For chanterelles, you have to blanch them in salted boiling water for a few seconds before sauteing. For black trumpet mushrooms, you have to cook out their moisture in a pan with some salt, and drain the excess water before you saute. They can really be extraordinary, if you treat them right."

// Here's a quote by Connie Green:
"This is pleasing and a tad embarrassing all at once. After all these years of
close chef contact and the mushroom biz, I thought I had a handle on just about
every basic chanterelle cooking technique. Wrong! A dear friend sent a post from
a wine blog about a chanterelle cooking method. The writer had been taught in a
French school to blanch the chanterelles in boiling water before sautéing. The
instruction was to blanch the whole chanterelles in rapidly boiling water for
20 seconds, remove, drain, pat with a towel, slice if needed, and then proceed
to sauté them until caramelized. The result are chanterelles that have actually
shed much of their excess moisture during the blanching process. The
post-blanching chanterelles sauté nicely without bleeding liquid into the sauté
pan. I knew that butter poaching has the same effect, but didn't realize that
the poaching was actually removing excess mushroom moisture.

After cross examining a French friend in the French wild mushroom trade, he
confirmed this. They have a lively business in producing little containers of
pre-cooked frozen wild mushrooms. They do this on a large scale, blanching,
draining and sautéing in oil, then freezing the mushrooms. He states that this
works very well indeed."

I haven't tried that but as the local season is near I will try it out. Wonder if it works for morels, the mushrooms that bugs love to live inside. At least they would then be dead bugs!

[Jenise]

The result are chanterelles that have actually
shed much of their excess moisture during the blanching process.

Never in a millions years would have guessed this.

Agree - who would predict that plunging into hot water would remove...water?? I'm certainly going to try this, though!

Indeed! There was another snippet, that I can no longer find, that suggests the incredibly quick parboil does not remove the water but somehow changes the pores on the surface of the mushroom so water no longer seeps.

Didn't SFJoe advocate this method on Therapy/Disorder some years ago. I never had the guts to try it, even though it seems to come from reputable sources! But sounds interesting. And I guess the trick would be to properly do the blanching and not let them stay in too long.

Didn't SFJoe advocate this method on Therapy/Disorder some years ago. I never had the guts to try it, even though it seems to come from reputable sources! But sounds interesting. And I guess the trick would be to properly do the blanching and not let them stay in too long.

SFJoe never tried it. Others recommended it to him and, eventually, serious chefs and food scientists wrote about it in other places.

Is this is the same principle same with eggplant which swims in oil and gets mushy if fried without par cooking ? After parcooking the flavors penetrate the eggplant rather than sitting in the oil and the texture is preserved allowing for crisping the edges.

Is this is the same principle same with eggplant which swims in oil and gets mushy if fried without par cooking ? After parcooking the flavors penetrate the eggplant rather than sitting in the oil and the texture is preserved allowing for crisping the edges.

I don't think I know that one. I don't prepare eggplant much at all because Pumpkin won't touch it. The last time I made it I think I salted the slices to make the water come up.