We need to talk about dry porcini.
It’s an ingredient I use a lot in my cooking and every time I use it in class, most people
are shocked that the porcini themselves are going into trash after soaking.
So I thought I should make a video once and for all that answers why I throw them away
and all the other questions I get about dry mushrooms.
Here are some dry mushroom basics.
Dry mushrooms and fresh mushrooms aren’t interchangeable.
Just like raisins and grapes aren’t interchangeable.
Can you imagine oatmeal raisin cookies made with grapes?
Exactly.
What we prize in fresh mushrooms is the texture.
What we prize in dry mushrooms is the aroma.
It’s not to say that the fresh mushrooms don’t have an aroma.
Of course they do, and it’s lovely, but it’s not aroma on steroids.
It’s kind of like comparing grape juice to wine.
Sure, grape juice smells like grapes, but it doesn’t offer the kind of complexity
that wine offers.
The king of all these aromatic dry mushrooms is porcini.
It’s quintessentially mushroomy.
To me, it smells like the forest with a hint of apricot.
Oh gosh, I sound like one of those annoying wine people.
Look, smells are very individual.
So to you, porcini might smell completely different than to me.
In terms of taste, dry porcini are an umami bomb.
Obviously, fresh porcini and all mushrooms have umami too, but in a dry mushroom it’s
more concentrated.
But texture-wise, dry mushrooms can be a little leathery.
Even if you soak them for a long time, you’ll never get their original texture back.
When I use dry porcini, what I am after is the soaking liquid.
It’s worth its weight in gold.
More often than not, I throw the porcini pieces away after soaking because they are loaded
with dirt and worms.
Yours might be completely different.
When I was in France, I bought dry porcini at a farmer’s market in Dordogne that were
perfectly clean.
Ideally, the porcini should be cleaned and inspected for damage before drying.
And it looks like in some parts of the world they are.
But what I can buy in Boston is usually insanely dirty and loaded with worms.
I tried Whole Foods, I tried local gourmet stores, I tried Amazon.
That’s just the reality of the porcini I have to work with.
The difficulty of cleaning dry mushrooms is that they are often in little pieces and you
have to clean every single piece.
And no, just letting them soak doesn’t remove all the dirt.
The dirt is stuck in the wrinkles and crevices and you have to rub every piece very carefully.
If the dirt is stuck in the pores (that’s the area under the cap that’s sort of spongy),
there is no way to get it out at all.
I really hate eating grit.
A gritty mushroom or mussel or scallop is like fingernails on a chalkboard for me.
But if you aren’t as sensitive to grit, you can probably just rinse them and use them.
The worms are purely psychological.
They are harmless.
If I wasn’t the one cooking these porcini and ate a few worms unknowingly, I’d be
fine.
It’s probably more protein.
But once I know, I can’t help it.
I have a terrible phobia of anything creepy crawly.
It’s very close minded.
I know that bugs can be delicious.
I just can’t bring myself to eat them.
The good news is that all this dirt and all those worms make no difference to the quality
of the soaking liquid.
The soaking liquid is fantastic!
All you have to do is strain it through a paper towel to catch all that grit and voila.
Any dish you add it to becomes a perfumy umami bomb.
Figuring out the country of origin or your dry porcini is difficult to impossible.
Look at this label from a FungusAmongUs.
This is a brand that many stores in the US carry.
May contain product from Europe, USA, Canada, and China.
I guess we know these mushrooms aren’t from Antarctica, but that’s about it.
I also don’t know what this organic label means.
“Organic” is a certification that applies to farmed products and these mushrooms are
supposed to be wild.
That being said, their flavor is what I would expect from European porcini.
I don’t have any FungusAmongUs porcini on hand right now.
But I have some from a very upscale market in the Boston area that look and taste similar.
Small, dark pieces that produce a very dark, very intense smelling and tasting liquid.
Recently, I tried dry porcini from the Pacific Northwest of Canada from a company called
GT Leaf that sells on amazon.
They claim that 70% of their porcini are from Canada or Pacific NorthWest of the US and
30% from Europe.
These mushrooms are a lot bigger and a lot cleaner than most porcini I can find.
This is one of the few brands that’s clean enough that I can often save at least some
of the pieces.
See this one is a bit wormy, but most of them are very nice.
But I find their aroma somewhat different from European porcini.
They smell a lot milder with hints of nuts and apricots, and not as woody and mushroomy
as the ones from my local store.
They are excellent mushrooms, but different.
The boletus species (that’s the Latin word for porcini) will look, smell, and taste somewhat
different depending on its habitat.
These differences don’t necessarily mean there has been any fraud and that these mushrooms
aren’t from the boletus family.
That being said, fraud is indeed very common in the world of dry mushrooms.
Adam from Learn Your Land YouTube channel has a great video about that.
I’ll link to it below.
Here is my basic dry porcini procedure.
For every 10g of mushrooms I use 1 cup of boiling water.
You don’t need to be precise.
I never measure it unless I am developing a recipe and need to give you measurements.
Let it sit at least 30 minutes, though prefer 1 hour.
If it makes your life any easier you can let them sit overnight.
If you want to use the mushrooms, get them out and rinse each one under running water
rubbing all the surfaces to make sure you get rid of all the dirt and worms.
I didn’t want to move my camera, so I did it in a bowl on the counter.
Strain the liquid through a sieve lined with a damp paper towel.
I make it damp with water first so that I can mold it over my strainer and so that it
doesn’t absorb as much of my precious porcini liquid.
Make sure to press on the mushrooms to get every last bit of liquid out of them.
If you are using the dry porcini pieces, chop them up and add to your dish.
In case I want mushroom pieces in my dish and don’t want to use the dry porcini pieces,
I often use fresh sauteed mushrooms like cremini, oyster, and maitake.
They give me great texture and the porcini liquid gives me great flavor.
Porcini have an unmistakable aroma.
No other dry mushroom smells like them.
So if your recipe calls for dry porcini, I wouldn’t mess with it.
I hope this video will help you work with dry porcini because that’s the key ingredient
in my next two videos.
One is a braised cabbage with porcini sour cream sauce and another one is a farro mushroom
risotto.
Here are more thought provoking culinary videos for you to check out and if you are ever in
the Boston area, maybe I’ll see you in one of my classes.