I Went Chanterelle Hunting Today
Bad knees and all and I am sure I will pay for the outing tonight!
My favorite Spring mushroom is the morel mushroom. It has a small window of time and weather conditions, so morels are a treasure!
My next favorite is the Summertime chanterelle. It has a bigger season and the weather doesn’t have to be perfect, but rain and sunshine are key.
Chanterelles are golden in color and range from yellow to red to bright orange. They are trumpet or cup shaped mushrooms. They say the flavor of chanterelle mushrooms is like peach or apricot (without the sweetness). I’ve never found any that taste like that. In fact, most chanterelle mushrooms tend to have a subtle earthy taste.
Preparing them with minimal ingredients is the best way to enjoy them. But I’ll share other ways here too.
They’re rich in vitamin D. Their high content of vitamin D makes chanterelle mushrooms an ideal option for improving bone health and supporting the immune system. Additionally, chanterelles are also a good source of fiber and have great anti-inflammatory properties.
The more vibrant the color, the fresher the chanterelle is.
In the midwest, season starts in Mid-July and goes through August. In the Pacific Northwest I understand one can find chanterelles into November.
You probably can find them at farmer’s markets right now in the Midwest and East Coast in the United States.
We Were Pretty Serious Mushroom Vendors
We were known at our farmers market as the folks with the best mushrooms, and we were the ones with the best mushrooms.
Yes, those are blue mushrooms and boy are they good.
Sautéd simply in good European butter.
Fun on a plate too. If you deep fry or quickly stir fry they stay close to the bright blue. The longer indigo milk cap mushrooms cook, the more they take on a grey color.
Rare, but edible and delicious!
We even made mushroom coffee, way ahead of the current craze! They sold like crazy as well.
We had an unmatched variety of wild mushrooms.
But the chanterelles were always a big hit with our clientele and we provided what they wanted!
I remember one summer we took 30 pounds of chanterelles to market. People waited in a line to get them.
We displayed them in pint and quart tills, the pint held approximately 1/4-1/3 pound. That worked out to about $20 a pound, so for a walk in the woods, the math wasn’t bad.
We always sold out.
Sometimes we’d find Black Trumpet mushrooms in the same season and chefs loved, loved when we had those. They have a more intense flavor than a chanterelle and market customers were always afraid of them.
Other names are trumpet of death, and devil's horn so I suppose those names could scare one off. But also called the “poor man's truffle” and chefs loved them.
Frequently we sold them solely to chefs, but sometimes we held some back for our market customers. Those went for $50 a pound, but we sold them in quarter pounds at market for those who just wanted to try them.
Once we retired, we’ve heard, that market hasn’t had good mushrooms since us, but that’s just fun gossip. Sure they have a guy who grows oysters, shiitakes and other cultivated mushrooms in his basement and shed, but nothing compares to wild mushrooms and he can’t cultivate what we used to bring.
We sometimes get emails from our diehard customers, but as much as they beg, we’re out of business.
During the pandemic we took orders for morels in the Spring and then chanterelle mushrooms in the Summer using a Square storefront (AI generated definition “an online store created using Square's eCommerce platform, allowing businesses to sell products and services online”).
We couldn’t believe how many orders we got.
One customer was so grateful that we ventured out during the pandemic to forage and deliver into the city, he sent us photos (above) and his recipe for his chanterelle pasta:
Ingredients
2 tablespoons butter
1 clove garlic, grated
1/2 pound chanterelle mushrooms, cleaned
1/2 cup cream
Fettuccine pasta enough for four
1/2 to 1 cup cheese, grated
salt and pepper, to season
Instructions
1. Prepare the pasta according to the instructions in the package. Do not throw away all the pasta water!
2. While waiting, heat the butter in a medium or large pan over medium-high heat.
3. When the butter has completely melted, add the chanterelle mushrooms.
4. Cook until the liquid comes out of the mushrooms and they have shrunk.
5. Add the grated garlic and mix to combine.
6. Pour the cream and let simmer for about five minutes. Adjust the heat and leave uncovered --- do not let it boil.
7. Taste and adjust the seasoning by adding salt and ground black pepper.
8. Toss the pasta with the chanterelle mushrooms and cream.
9. Add about three tablespoons of pasta water and mix for a minute to combine everything evenly.
10. Remove from the heat and transfer into plates.
I Went Chanterelle Picking Today
But today, I went chanterelle picking.
Bad knees and all and I am sure I will pay for the outing tonight!
I didn’t say hunting, I said picking.
I couldn’t resist.
With the weather we’ve had, there were too many to ignore.
Beautiful, huge patches of orange goodness everywhere you look in our forest.
They’re everywhere!
So, tonight we’re grilling a marinated flank steak and I intend to simply sauté the chanterelles in European (Irish) butter with some rosemary.
You start any recipe that feature wild chanterelles by sautéing them.
Never eat a wild mushroom raw!
Below are three videos that show the stages mushrooms, especially chanterelles go through during the cooking process.
We used to have these on our facebook page for our customers. People didn’t understand that you have to remove the water before you can actually sauté them.
This is true with most mushrooms, but especially with wild ones.
Stage one, add the mushrooms and the butter to a hot cast iron pan.
For the first few minutes in the pan, the water begins to release from the mushrooms and the butter floats around in the water.
Stage two, most of the water has been cooked away and you have more butter than water at this point.
Watch your heat now because butter burns quickly.
Stage three is where the magic happens. Mushrooms and butter. It doesn’t get much better. Be careful your butter doesn’t burn.
Once the mushrooms look like the photo, they’re done. It’s at this point you add your other goodies, in my case tonight, it simply will be rosemary.
If you’re going to add garlic or onions to the mix, sauté them first and remove them from the pan then cook the mushrooms. Add them back after the mushrooms have cooked down (stage three).
A Simple Mushroom Sauté
Ingredients
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 large shallot, fine dice
1 clove garlic
1 lb chanterelle mushrooms, quartered, rough ends removed
3 Tbsp butter
¼ tsp salt
pinch pepper
Instructions
Bring a large pan to medium high heat and add olive oil. When hot, add shallots. Cook for ~ 4 minutes or until translucent. Turn down the heat if the onions start to brown.
Add garlic to the onions and cook 1-2 minutes or until fragrant and set the onion/garlic mixture aside on a plate.
Wipe the pan (careful it's hot!) and add chanterelle mushrooms and butter. The mushrooms will begin to release water, watch carefully. The whole process takes between 2 and 5 minutes, it deprives on how dry the mushrooms were to begin with.
Once the water has cooked off, turn down the heat if the pan is smoking too much.
Add cooked onions and garlic and stir. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Ok, I’ve had them sautéed, I put them in a cream sauce with pasta, how else can I enjoy chanterelles?
How about on Pizza?
I’ve done it two ways.
Playing around with Grandma pizza recipes and traditional.
Whats a Grandma pizza?
Grandma pizza is a Sicilian-style pie that originated in New York. It has a thin crust and it's cooked in a square pan. Grandma pizza is traditionally made without a pizza oven. It has distinctly thin crust, Grandma pizza is cooked in an olive oil-coated rectangular pan and topped with mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce. (The sauce is typically layered over the cheese—not the other way around.) It's cut into square pieces for serving.
I sautéed chanterelles and added them to the top of the square pizza before baking. This was good.
The second way was a traditional pizza crust, done on the grill on a pizza stone. Five cheeses (provolone, asiago, smoked gouda, parmigiana, Romano) then sautéed chanterelles and black trumpets on top before baking. This was fabulous!
I hope you can get a basket of chanterelles to try them.
Happy Chanterelle season!
One of my favorite trading partners at the market is a mushroom vendor … nothing better. I generally do a mushroom butter saute and serve it alongside a nice steak.
I am impressed with your expertise and envious of your foraging grounds. I picked wild blackberries this morning.