Avocado toast is so 2015. The cool kid on the block is the mushroom toast. Seriously.
Just look at any cooking magazine or farm-to-table restaurant menu. So before it’s too late,
you should make it and instagram it for posterity.
Ok, but all joking aside, mushroom toast is wicked good and today we are celebrating it
by using a French mushroom mixture called duxelles. Before there was instagram, before
there was internet, and even before there was electricity, there was duxelles. Mushroom
toast trend might come and go, but duxelles is like a little black dress of mushrooms.
It’s never out of fashion and it can be used to stuff chicken, pasta, and absolutely
anything you want.
Let’s start by washing and drying 4 large portabello mushrooms or a pound and a half
of button mushrooms. Yes, it’s ok to wash portobellos and button mushrooms. No they
don’t absorb water like crazy. That’s what chanterelles and flimsy mushrooms do,
but portabellos, no worries. Trim the stem and if it doesn’t have any bad spots, you
can chop it up and use it. If you see serious rotting like this, you might want to discard
it. Cut all the mushrooms into large dice. By the way, I don’t get why everyone is
scraping out portabella gills. They’ve never bothered me personally, so I leave them in.
Set a 12 inch skillet (stainless steel if possible) over high heat. Add 2 Tbsp of olive
oil and 1 tablespoon of butter. When the butter is melted, add the mushrooms, a generous pinch
of salt and a ¼ cup of dry white wine and immediately close with a lid to prevent the
wine from evaporating too quickly. Cook for about 5 minutes or until the mushrooms release
a huge pool of liquid. Getting their moisture to come out first shrinks them a great deal.
Why is that good? Because now more mushrooms touch the bottom of the pan, which results
in more even browning. It also eliminates that yucky styrofoamy raw mushroom texture.
Remove the lid, fogging up your camera lens just like this, and cook until all the liquid
evaporates. We are on high heat this whole time. Things are so wet, there is absolutely
no way for them to burn. When all the moisture is gone, turn down the heat to medium and
cook stirring occasionally until the mushrooms brown. Yes, at this point they can burn, so
you want to regulate the heat and stir as necessary. Here is what a brown mushroom should
look like.
Then add 1 diced yellow onion or a few shallots that you cooked in olive oil or butter until
brown. I do this in a separate skillet to make sure that both the mushrooms and onions
are cooked just right. We’ve done this a million times on this channel, so if you need
any help, just look in the description below this video. I happen to have some diced and
cooked yellow onions in my fridge thanks to a knife skills class, so I’ll go with that.
These onions were earned with the blood, sweat, and tears of my students and it would be a
crying shame to waste them. Don’t worry. I am kidding about blood and sweat, but the
tears were totally real. Ok, my onions are rewarmed and I can deglaze the pan with a
couple of tablespoons of heavy cream to pick up all those wonderful brown bits. In about
a minute the cream will absorb and you can remove the pan from heat.
Add a little black pepper and cool the mushrooms enough to put them into the food processor.
I mean this is not the 17th century, so there is no need to do this with a knife. Dump the
mushrooms into the food processor. Add 2 Tbsp of sourcream. Yes, I know it’s not authentic,
but it is delicious. Puree the mushrooms scraping down the sides of the bowl until you get a
coarse puree. I prefer this mixture to be a bit chunky. Move it to a bowl, taste and
correct for salt. Rewarm before serving and if you have any leftovers, they’ll last
in the fridge for up to 5 days. The only thing better than a mushroom toast is a mushroom
toast with a poached egg. And now... for a moment of food porn silence.
Yes, it tastes as good as it looks.
Here are more classic culinary condiments that were bastardized by yours truly. Just
a warning, they might be even more addictive than the originals.
So check them out and if you are ever in the Boston area, maybe I’ll see you in one of
my classes.