Winter
It is "officially" winter here along the lakeshore of Wisconsin. To my mind winter has not truly arrived, no matter what the calendar date, until we get our first good snow, the kind of snow that completely covers the grass and sticks around for at least a few days of cold, blustery weather. We got that very thing a few days ago.
It's been cold. The thermometer has been hovering around 10°F during the day and below 0° at night. I've worried a little about the ducks, even though I know they can handle the cold so long as they're out of the wind. Still, they spend a lot of time on their bellies, often walking just a few feet in the snow before dropping to the ground for several minutes to warm their duck feet beneath their bodies.
The ducks are easy to catch now too, which I do ever so often when I go out to feed them or chip the ice from their water pails and refill with warm tap water. Where in the warm months they'd lead me on a comic chase if I tried to catch one, now they just seem to look at me with an expression that says, "It's too cold to run through this snow so go ahead and pick me up if you must. Just don't get the idea that I enjoy it." Whichever one I happen to capture, I'll hold his or her cold webbed feet in my hands to try to warm them up a bit, or place her in the larger plastic tub filled with warm water. They really enjoy being in the water, bathing, splashing, quacking happily. I imagine the warm water feels good, but they sometimes seem hesitant at hopping up into the tub themselves in the cold weather. I don't know why. Maybe it just requires too much effort at a time when energy conservation is a priority. When they hop out of the tub the water freezes on their feathers in tiny beads of ice.
I also like to think that during winter the normal hierarchical pecking and antagonism between the older and younger males abates a little bit. The conflict continues, but it seems less contentious and mean now that it's become too cold for the old man to chase the young fella too far. This is a time of year when the proximity of other warm bodies perhaps overcomes instinctual pecking order issues.
Winter. I love it. I love being outside, in the quiet woods, at streams of defiantly flowing water, with snow covering and muffling everything. It's the time of year when a stand of snow-covered pines seems cozy; when cinnamon and wood smoke smell even more wonderful than they normally do; when hot coffee, brandy and cream is a favorite breakfast drink; when I quietly thank the person who invented flannel bed sheets. It's the time of year when we prefer candlelight to electricity, when having friends over for company is even nicer, when we feel like actually writing an honest-to-goodness letter with pen on paper, and when hugs serve a dual purpose of warming the spirit and the body.
It's that time of year when it's easy to catch ducks.
Squirrel & Mushroom Pizza
My daughter works at an Italian restaurant and the other day she brought home a little bag of pizza dough that was left over at the end of the night. I also had a loin and ribs in the fridge from some squirrel I hadn't cooked yet (I've got to start sharing my squirrel recipes...one of my favorite game meats). Well, the two bowls, of dough and squirrel meat, were looking like they wanted to be friends.
Squirrel & mushroom pizza.
I split the dough up and made enough for three small pizzas with added onion, mushrooms, greens and olive oil. Delish!
Sumac, another use: za'atar spice mix
Every Cub Scout or Boy Scout knows that a sweet/tart Kool-Aid-like tea can be made from fresh staghorn sumac berry clusters. You can also make sumac wine, jellies and other foodstuffs from sumac. Two or three weeks ago I harvested a small late season basket of semi-dry sumac berries for one specific purpose: I wanted to make a batch of za'atar, a spice blend popular in Middle Eastern cooking.
Staghorn sumac berry clusters. These berries have started to dry and are mostly past their prime for making fresh tea, but they're still good as a spice.
I had read that za'atar is put to good use when combined with olive oil as a seasoned dipping oil for bread - we love bread and oil as an appetizer or snack - as well as a seasoning for meat such as lamb or goat.
Za'atar is a spice blend that can be purchased through just about any spice company, as is sumac alone. You certainly could make your own za'atar blend by combining purchased herbs and spices. It's such a simple and easy blend to make, usually combining less than a half-dozen ingredients. But we're all about using as many ingredients as we can from non-commercial sources, such as from a garden, foraging, bartering and so on.
Note: We're not opposed to purchasing food items from the grocery store or from any commercial source, not at all - we strongly support buying quality food from quality sources - but rather because we're also in favor of saving a buck here and there, of doing things that you can do via your own effort and creativity, and of simply having fun while pursuing a more self-sufficient lifestyle.
Anyway, making a spice blend with herbs from the garden and foraged sumac is one of those small activities that yields both home-grown flavor and a good dose of fun in the making.
While there are variations to the recipe, basic za'atar ingredients include:
- sumac
- thyme
- sesame seeds
- sea salt
- oregano
Oregano, thyme, sumac, sesame seeds.
Oregano is actually one of those ingredients that is not considered essential, but is occasionally added to some blends. I had dried oregano from this year's garden and thought it would be a nice addition, so added it to the mix.
The processing of the sumac berries is the only real time consuming part of the recipe, and it's about as easy as falling off a log:
Strip the sumac berries from the clusters and toss them in a food processor. Pulse repeatedly until all of the fuzzy stuff is nicely pulverized and almost powdery. Pour the processed sumac into a sieve with holes of a size that will allow the fluffy stuff to sift through but that will retain the small, BB-like sumac seeds. I found that a standard hand sieve or strainer worked just fine. You want the seeds out, because they're as hard as rocks. Then toss the good stuff back into the food processor and run it again to grind it down even more finely. Sift it again. And then sift it again. And again. No seeds...you don't want someone cracking a tooth on one of the little beasties.
I processed enough sumac to yield about a ½ cup of dried, processed sumac berry. I think it required around 8 or 10 berry clusters.
Next, I added 3 or 4 tablespoons of dried thyme, 1 heaping tablespoon dried oregano, about 3 tablespoons of lightly toasted sesame seeds, and 1½ teaspoons sea salt. I toasted the sesame seeds in a hot cast-iron skillet for a few minutes, shaking it constantly until they became fragrant and lightly browned. Then I quickly and not too rigorously pulverized most of them with mortar and pestle. Stir everything together or put it in a tupperware container and shake it until it's mixed. That's it.
Taste it and make adjustments where you think it needs it. I ended up adding a bit more sumac because I like the tartness. I immediately made some dipping oil by adding some olive oil and grated parmesan, and soaked it up with chunks of italian bread while watching an old episode of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern (love that show). I'm also anxious to use the blend as a rub for a bit of goat I've got in the freezer; I think it would do well with that meat.
Beechnuts - a union break from shelling
I'm really just making this blogpost as an excuse to take a break from the finger-fatiguing work of shelling beechnuts. Beechnuts are one of my favorite wild nuts to eat, but also one of the most tedious to shell. They're tiny, a challenge to hang onto, and require a little more finesse, and therefore focus, than, say, butternuts or walnuts, which you can just whack with a hammer. Beechnuts need to practically be peeled from their smooth three-sided carapace. Not a job for a blunt instrument or a distracted frame of mind.
A small pile of even smaller autumn beechnuts.
My process is, in fact, to peel one of the three sides with a knife while pinching the back-side joint of the other two sides with the fingers of my other hand. I peel from upper point downward to the bulbous bottom, hopefully removing the shell side in one piece, whereupon I hope to use my thumbnails to pry apart the remaining shell sides to release the nutmeat within, whole. That's the way it usually works anyway, and the nut will practically fall out of its little teepee. Once in a while though, it requires more effort with the knife edge on one of the other shell sides.
Here's a nutmeat (center foreground) revealing itself from its shell after I peeled one side off (it's still attached, like a drawbridge). The three leaves of a shell lie around another nutmeat to the right. Whole unshelled nuts on the left and shelled nutmeats on the upper right.
It's not necessarily a slow process. I can average two or three beechnuts per minute, depending on their size and how smoothly I'm able to perform the initial cut. But when the reward is a nutmeat the size of a pea and an hour worth of concentrated effort yields a third of a cup, it can seem more tedious than it probably actually is. But isn't it true that the best things often require the most effort?
Shelled beechnuts. The papery skin, or testa, should be removed if possible. I'll rub a handful of nuts gently together between my palms to loosen the testa and then winnow it away.
Well, breaks over...back to work. I'll share how we use these beechnuts in the kitchen when we're done shelling. Talk to you again in a few months then I guess.
Fairy ring mushrooms
The last couple weeks have been rainy and moderate with temperatures in the mid to upper 40s. We've had a day or two where the sun peeked through and the temps climbed into the 50s, but each morning when I've gone out to feed the ducks I've looked at the sky and wondered if today was the day we'd get our first good snow.
While working in the yard to clean things up before everything gets covered with snow (a job that the sensible part of me thinks is entirely ridiculous, but which my OCD side nevertheless frets over) I discovered a patch of scattered fairy ring mushrooms, Marasmius oreades, hiding behind the beehive at the edge of the pines in the front of the house.
Fairy Ring mushrooms, Marasmius oreades.
Unless I get lucky and find some late season maitaki this might be the last hurrah for edible mushrooms for the year. Coming upon the fairy rings was a lovely little surprise and made for a pleasant spur-of-the-moment breakfast for my wife and me.
Fairy Ring mushrooms are a common lawn mushroom and may appear from spring through autumn. They're small, 1" to 3" tall and an inch or two wide at the cap. The caps are light tan or cream-colored, bell shaped when young, but becoming more planar as they age and often displaying a pronounced central bump or "umbo" on top, making them look kind of like tiny, wide-brimmed hats. The gills are generally a little lighter in color than the cap, and are free, or unattached from the stalk (or, as most books indicate, only slightly attached...but I've not seen any yet that are attached). The spore print is white or cream colored.
Fairy ring caps and a couple of spore prints.
Close-up of fairy ring spore prints. Click to enlarge.
The stalk is a major identifying feature of the fairy mushroom. It is very slender, shows no significant variation in diameter from top to bottom, and no ring, volva or veil. The real telling feature of the stalk, though, is its resiliency. It's a tough, fibrous little bugger, not easily broken or snapped in two, able to be bent and twisted with some force. The character of the stalk is important to remember in properly identifying fairy ring mushrooms.
The almost unbreakable stalk of the fairy ring mushroom.
It will usually either bend, as it is in this image, or crimp, as in the image above this one.
Here I twisted it back and forth until it separated, showing its stringy, fibrous interior.
Given what I just said about the stalk of the fairy mushroom it might be obvious that it is the cap that is the desired edible part of the fungi. When you collect them use a scissors and just snip the caps off. They are also a lightly fragrant mushroom, especially whilst being sauteed in butter. There's an almost herbal, very subtly floral mushroomy scent to them. They are fantastic.
Oh, and they may be about the easiest and most favorable mushroom to dry for long-term storage.
Unfortunately, there weren't enough in the yard this day to bother drying. There were just enough to fill an omelet for breakfast. And I'm quite happy with that.
Super-quick butternut squash & maple syrup soup
The only thing faster than making this delightfully sweet and savory soup is typing this blog post. I've had a couple of small butternut squash setting on the porch for the past couple weeks, and as we're having Ma & Pa come by for dinner tonight I thought it'd be a good opportunity to use them up. I'm cooking a pork roast and baking bread so I wanted a first course veg dish that is delicious, fast and simple. This soup meets all three criteria.
Butternut squash and maple syrup soup.
Ingredients:
- Couple of butternut squash, peeled, de-seeded and cubed into 1" to 2" pieces.
- Salt to taste, maybe 2-4 tsp.
- Cracked white peppercorns, 1-2 tsp (you can use black pepper, white just blends in better) .
- Heavy cream, ½ cup or so (you could also do without the cream if you don't have any on hand; it just softens it up a bit).
- Butter, ½ stick. If you forego the cream you might want to add more butter, up to ¾ stick total. If you use salted butter, keep that in mind when adding the salt.
- Wisconsin maple syrup, the real stuff...at least a ½ cup, upwards to a full cup...do it by taste.
Butternut squash flesh has such a great orange color.
- Add some water, maybe a cup, to a kettle and bring to a boil. The water is really there to help keep the squash from burning and sticking to the bottom.
- Toss in the squash chunks, lower the heat, put a lid on the kettle, simmer for 10 or 20 minutes, until the squash is soft and squishy.
- Mash it with a potato masher or a hand mixer. Add the butter, cream if you're using it, salt and pepper and mix well.
- Add the maple syrup, ½ cup to start, stir it in and taste it. Add more if you think it needs it. You may want to add a little more salt as well (I like the combination of sweet and salty, so I added a little more salt right before serving).
That's it. Might even have some for breakfast in the morning if there's any left.
Entoloma abortivum, the CatDog of mushrooms
Third in the current mushroom sequence. Entoloma abortivum, a.k.a. aborted entoloma, a.k.a. pig snoots, is one of the more confusing edible mushrooms around. It's not confusing to properly identify; that's a fairly simple matter concerning this weird little malformed blob of white deliciousness. What's confusing is the fungi's biology.
Aborted entoloma on open ground.
From what I've gathered in my studies there has been a good deal of uncertainty, hypothesizing and revision over the years concerning the hows and whats of aborted entoloma growth and formation. At one time the common wisdom was that Entoloma abortivum was simply a malformed, "aberration" of the entoloma mushroom, kind of the mushroomy equivalent of a two-headed snake or the brain-eating-mutant Rob Roberts from the old X-Files episode "Hungry" (embracing my sci-fi geek self today).
Then, in 1974 a paper by a fellow named Roy Watling presented evidence that showed that Entoloma abortivum contained hyphae (mycelium filaments) of another fungi, Armillaria melea (honey mushrooms) . His work convinced the fungi world that the Armillaria mushroom was somehow parasitizing the Entoloma mushroom, thus creating a funky Entoloma abortivum mutation. But wait, there's more! In recent years the theory has reversed the relationship, as new evidence from fungi experts Tom Volk, Dan Lindner and Harry Burdsall Jr. (Wisconsinites, btw) supports the hypothesis that it is Entoloma that is parasitizing Armillaria, rather than the other way around. And as you might imagine, online mushroom forums are full of lively chatter and debate on the subject.
Volk also recommends changing the common name of the mushroom from Aborted Entoloma to Aborted Amillaria. I'm kind of partial to our colloquial Pig Snoot, as that's the term I first associated them with when I was introduced to them many years ago by my friend Tom, who I've mentioned in previous mushroom posts. Volk also shares that the Mexican name for the mushroom is the colorful and slightly tongue twisting Totlcoxcatl, which means "turkey wattle". I love that one too.
All of this confusion on who's affecting who, which mutation came first, and just what the heck is this thing really, makes it the CatDog of mushrooms in my book.
CatDog, one of my favorite cartoons, created by the fantastic Peter Hannan. I am convinced that CatDog frequently dined on Aborted Entoloma.
So, what does all of this scientific mushroom mystery and theater have to do with your pursuit of tasty pig snoots? I'm not sure...maybe nothing. But it certainly is interesting, and ought to, I think, enhance our appreciation for this seasonal delicacy.
A nice harvest of Pig Snoots.
Properly identifying pig snoots is pretty simple, as there are no mushrooms that it could reasonably be mistaken for. Look for these characteristics:
- White body, perhaps with bits of gray or dull salmon, particularly in the interior.
- Texture is firm to spongy, pithy, with no discernable directional grain.
- Absence of gills.
- Knobby and misshapen in appearance (also descriptively called "ground prunes" in some locales). No discernable stem, or at best a very abbreviated stem.
- Aroma is somewhat mealy and earthy.
- Found in the dirt at the base of both living and dead trees and stumps, as well as on open ground where the soil is rich.
- Fruit in autumn, September and October here in Wisconsin.
Note the very short, woody stems on the central mushrooms. Other aborted entoloma may not even display this much visible stem.
Pig snoots are best prepared soon after harvesting, Clean with a brush and a quick rinse in cold water. They can host a few tiny visitors, especially on their undersides, so be sure to be thorough in your cleaning and don't be afraid to cut off any mushy or undesirable spots. Once clean and dried with a soft towel I usually space them out on a wire rack to allow them to dry and firm up a little bit more. I've had no success, however, with drying them for preservation. Slice to uniform thickness of about a ¼".
I prefer to fry or saute pig snoots fairly quickly at a little higher heat, in butter or bacon grease. They are rather spongy and will soak up any oil, butter or bacon fat in the pan. A pinch of salt and pepper, and maybe an even more stingy pinch of ground nutmeg is good for seasoning. Cook them until they brown, and that's it. Then you can add them to whatever you want or just eat them as they are. I find it best to cook them before adding to a dish, as opposed to adding them raw and cooking in the dish itself. I like my pig snoots with eggs, rice, noodles and on sandwiches, although when I serve them to company I may refer to them as Totlcoxcatl, just because it sounds more elegant.
Aborted Entoloma, Aborted Armillarias, Pig Snoots, Ground Prunes, Totlcoxcatl or whatever you choose to call them, these amorphous fungi are fun to hunt - every one is unique - and very good to eat.
* You can read Tom Volk's account of the developments associated with Aborted Armillaria, as well as view more images, at Tom Volk's Fungi. He also shares a link to the paper he, Lindner and Burdsall presented, which details their research into the relationship between Entoloma, Armillaria and their aborted "offspring".
Acorn flour
I've always been fascinated by acorns, ever since I was a little kid. I loved the Looney Tunes cartoons with Mac and Tosh, the Goofy Gophers, and the two rodents' obsessive desire to collect truckloads of acorns while outwitting loggers or Elmer Fudd. When hunting or hiking through the woods I would, and often still do, invariably come home with a pocket full of the smooth-shelled little nuts, just for the pleasure of examining and admiring their symmetrical beauty.
Acorns
I tried eating them several times as a youngster, figuring that if the squirrels loved them they must be good. But whenever I cracked them open and chewed the hard nuts inside I found that their flavor ranged from barely palatable to only okay, and ultimately deemed that while they must be edible on some level they were probably a food that only squirrels could truly appreciate.
Then, as a teenager I read Euell Gibbons. That changed everything. Gibbon's brief chapter, and the first food-specific chapter in his Stalking the Wild Asparagus, was about acorns and their use as a reliable food source both historically and presently. He even compared them favorably with candied chestnuts when prepared in a similar manner. All I needed to do, according to Gibbons, was learn and practice the process of leaching with water the bitter tannins from the acorn nutmeats. Badaboom badabing, acorn hurdle solved!
I don't use acorns much as whole or pieced nuts, but more often like to make flour from them. So that's what we'll look at in this post. I've used both hot water and cold water leaching methods to process acorns. They both work, and they both yield different results as far as flavor, color and texture of the finished product is concerned. The best and most thorough discussion I've ever seen on the leaching process is found in Sam Thayer's excellent book, Nature's Garden. Thayer explains in detail several leaching techniques, as well as the entire operation of processing acorns, from collection to shelling to grinding to leaching and more. But his discussion on identifying and delineating good, worthy acorns from bad, weevil infested acorns is what I found most impressive. The man has collected, processed and eaten many hundreds of pounds of acorns in his life, and his knowledge on the subject is unsurpassed.
Here's how I processed a few pounds of acorns into flour recently.
1. Sort and clean. Upon returning home after collecting the acorns I placed them in a sink full of cold water and swished them around. This serves to clean them and to further separate sound acorns from damaged acorns. Acorns that are weevil damaged will float, and you can easily skim those from the water and dispose of them (see images below of damaged acorns, but we'll talk more in depth about weevils and other acorn and oak issues in a future article). The ones that sink are not all necessarily weevil or otherwise damage free, but the ones that float surely are damaged, So, by skimming the floaters you've effectively eliminated the sure losers right away. And don't wait to do this; do it while your acorns are freshly collected. If you let them sit around for a week before getting to them the good ones will begin to dry a bit, and as they dry they become more buoyant, and some that are good may float along with the ones that are damaged, making the float test imprecise.
Acorns with weevil exit holes. These acorns are no good.
2. Shell and dry. I only collected a few pounds of acorns on this outing so I decided to shell them immediately and then dry the nutmeats. You could also dry the nuts in the shell, and then shell them later at your convenience. I just had the time and inclination to do everything right away with this batch. Once the nuts dry they have a long shelf life as most nuts do (I've still got dried butternuts in the shell from last year to get to).
There are several of ways to shell acorns. To crack the shells you can use a nutcracker, or place them in a cloth bag or under a towel and hit them with a hammer, or ""peel" them with a knife if the shells haven't dried out and are still pliable. Thayer has a very interesting shelling method he calls "the towel method", which makes use of, yes, a towel and a "stomper", a 5'- or 6'-long smooth pestle-shaped heavy piece of wood. I won't describe his process here, but encourage you to purchase his book so you can read about it yourself. Whatever method you choose to remove the shells from the nutmeats is fine. I've used them all and they all work to one degree or another. With this small batch I chose to peel them with a knife because the shells were pliable enough and I could do it while sitting and watching a football game on TV (and the Packers won...so now I feel like I have to shell acorns during every game).
I would take an acorn and, with small sharp knife in my right hand, would make two or three quick, shallow vertical cuts into the shell from top to bottom of the acorn by rocking or arcing the knife edge with some pressure along the surface of the shell, effectively creating one or two elliptical or teardrop shaped patterns in the shell. Then, using the edge of the knife or a fingernail I'd pry or peel the little teardrop of shell from its place, trying to bring the inner "bark" or lining of the shell with it. Once that first piece was removed it was a simple matter to pop the rest of the shell off the nutmeat. This sounds more involved than it really is, but once you get into the rhythm of it it takes just a few seconds to shell each nut.
During the shelling process you will also inevitably find acorns that are black and damaged that you didn't discover earlier. Just toss them out. Once all of the acorns are shelled you need to check them over again for any bits of shell or chaff that may be hanging around. It's not a bad idea to give them another wash in the sink. You can grab a handful of the nutmeats and rub them between your palms underwater. This will also help to loosen and remove some of the testa, a brown skin like that which covers peanuts, that may be attached to the nutmeat.
Once you've got everything shelled and cleaned the tough manual labor part of the process is over. Drain the nuts in a colander and lay them out on towels or on baking sheets to dry a bit. I wanted to hurry the process along so I dried them by placing them in the oven at the lowest setting and with the door ajar. They darkened a bit while in the oven, but that's okay. You can now let them dry completely and store them in an airtight container, or proceed with the next steps straight away.
Shelled acorns drying.
3. Chop and grind. Acorn nuts are hard, too hard to grind as larger pieces in a countertop coffee grinder. I know this because I burned one out trying to do just that. With the small quantity I had on this day I simply roughly chopped the acorns with a chef's knife as I might chop walnuts and then, once I had more or less uniformly small pieces, used a food processor to further pulverize them. Add enough water to the chopped acorns in the food processor to help chop them up. You probably won't be able to get acorns small enough with a food processor to qualify as flour, but you can get them pretty small, like grits or course corn meal in consistency. That's okay because they're now small enough for a coffee grinder to handle them, and certainly small enough to make using a mortar and pestle less taxing.
Acorn grits.
4. Leaching. I now had a pail full of gritty acorn slurry. I could strain and dry it, and then grind it even more finely before leaching. Leaching smaller particles is more efficient for removing tannins; larger particles require more leaching time. But I chose to begin the leaching process with this grittier quantity and then grind it into flour afterward.
The method I generally use for cold leaching is an old one: simply immerse the thing to be leached in numerous changes of water. When camping once I filled a cloth bag with acorn nutmeats and tied it to a stick in the shallow water of the lake we were camping near. Here at home I just use a giant glass jar.
- Place the acorn flour or grits into the jar no more than a third of the way up.
- Fill the jar with cold water and give it a good stir.
- Let it sit in the fridge for several hours or even a day at a time.
- Drain or decant the water from the particulates that settle on the bottom.
- Repeat, over and over and over, until the nuts no longer taste bitter.
One of my acorn leaching jars.
I let this batch leach for a week-and-a-half. The color of the water is not an indicator of when the process is complete (it won't become clear); you have to use taste as your guide. Be patient...this is simple and doesn't require much interference on your part, it's just very time consuming.
Once the acorns lose their bitterness, you'll want to squeeze out as much water as you possibly can. Set a strainer or colander over a bowl, line it with cheesecloth or a tea towel, scoop in a softball-size blob of acorn mush, bring the corners of the cloth together and begin twisting it to tighten the ball more and more. Squeeze the ball with your hands as hard as you can to get as much moisture out as possible. When you remove the acorn mush from the cloth it will be like a ball of sandy clay if it's gritty to begin with. Repeat with all of the acorn mush.
Straining and squeezing after leaching.
NOTE: The moisture that you wring from the acorn mash can be used if you wish. It's not quite the same as the leaching water drained from the jar each day. It's a little more milky, so to speak, and it's got some flavor and nutrients. I used this particular acorn milk to poach a chicken in that I used in a mushroom and chicken potpie.
Ball of clay-like acorn flour.
5. Dry. Next, I spread the acorn grits onto a couple of baking sheets, breaking up the bigger clumps with a fork, and again set them in the oven at its lowest setting and with the door ajar, stirring occasionally, until they were completely dry.
6. Grind into flour. Now I had a good quantity of dry, tan-colored acorn grits, the consistency of sand. A coffee grinder could handle these particles pretty easily, and in no time at all I ground everything into fine flour. Store the acorn flour in a dry container or sack as you would any flour. You can use acorn flour like you might any non-wheat grain or nut flour. Add it to recipes for breads, pastas, gravies and so on. Among other things, I'll be using it to make pie crusts for meat and mushroom pies I have on our Thanksgiving menu. We'll share those recipes with you when we make them.
One jar of finished acorn flour.
I'd wager that there are oak trees near where you live, maybe even in your own yard. Why let the squirrels have all of those tasty acorns. With the quantity of acorns that an oak tree can produce, chances are that there are enough for both you and the squirrels to enjoy.
Mushroom & Chicken Pot Pie
Used the last puffball mushroom to make this mushroom and chicken pot pie tonight. Click here for Saturday's post on puffballs.
Puffball mushroom & chicken pot pie.
Puffball mushrooms
This is the second in a series of three successive mushroom posts, sparked by our recent forays into the woods where we harvested honey mushrooms, puffballs and aborted entoloma.
Giant puffballs (Calvatia gigantea) are perhaps the easiest mushroom to confidently ID. I mean, how many mushrooms grow to such enormous size, look like big white volleyballs, and are almost impossible to not see when their fruiting bodies appear. There are several species of puffball, and many of them are edible, but for this post we're really only interested in the giants.
A couple of modest though still impressive examples of calvatia gigantea.
Of course their size is the first key to identifying a puffball. Generally growing from softball to basketball size they can, however, get much larger. I believe the largest one on record is 66" in circumference; that's five-and-a-half feet around! The biggest I've ever found was the size of a basketball, with most being near volleyball-size.
Three big puffballs on a forest floor. There were several more smaller ones a few yards away from this triad.
Things get a bit humorous for we puffball hunters come autumn, when the mushrooms begin appearing. I don't know how many times I've hit the brakes while driving or pulled over to the side of the road upon seeing a large puffball setting in the grass somewhere, only to discover that the suspect actually is a volleyball or white pail or even something white but not remotely resembling a ball at all. But one is correct often enough that the occasional embarrassment of being fooled is worth it.
Giant puffballs grow on grass or the forest floor, not on wood as do many other mushrooms. That makes them even more conspicuous. They also grow singly and not in clusters, although it is not uncommon to find several growing in proximity of one another. Every year we get a few softball-sized ones in our yard. They're small and have rougher, faceted skins than do giant puffballs, which leads me to think they may be a species of Sculpted Puffball (see image below), but my understanding is that sculpted puffballs are primarily a western species. I'm not sure, but I do know that they are edible and delicious.
I'm thinking these two may be a species of sculpted puffball, which are practically the same in all respects except for the skin texture to giant puffballs.
Skin texture of giant puffball.
The skin of the large puffballs is leathery, in both texture and thickness. It is easy to peel off, which should be done prior to preparing for the table. The interior of a good, edible puffball is beautiful in its pure, clean, unblemished whiteness. The texture is something akin to a firm, dry marshmallow (no stickiness) or a dense foam such as you might find in certain packing materials. Upon examining the inside, if you see any discoloration, any yellowing or greening, that means that the mushroom is beginning to turn and that its spores are developing in order to soon be released. You may as well toss the mushroom in that case, because it will not taste good at all. Toss it in your yard and maybe you'll get lucky next year with some puffball offspring.
Cleaning puffballs is as easy as wiping the surface with a damp cloth, although you should also give the underside where the mushroom attached to the ground a good examination, as puffballs are a desirable food source for a number of creepy-crawlies, especially millipedes. If you have some buggy diners working their way into the mushroom you can simply cut away the portion that they have claimed and, if the rest of the mushroom is white and firm, make good use of the remainder.
Puffballs do not have a good shelf life. You usually need to use them within two or three days before they start to turn. Refrigerating them may extend the shelf life a bit, but once they start to discolor they go very quickly indeed. I haven't yet come upon a preservation method that I really like. As far as I'm concerned, puffballs really are a seasonal food and are at their best when prepared immediately. Their ephemeral quality somehow makes them all the more special, I think.
Slicing a giant puffball. Note the clean white flesh and leather-like outer skin. i sliced this one with a chef's knife, which makes a little rougher cut, so that you can get a better sense of the texture of the meat of the mushroom. Compare to the image below of the puffball I sliced with a fillet knife.
Slicing a small puffball. I like to use a fillet knife for most puffball slicing, but a rougher cut may be preferred when breading and frying the mushroom, as it leaves a nice rough surface for the wash and breading to stick to.
Peeling the skin of a slice.
Peeling a small puffball. 1 of 3.
Peeling a small puffball. 2 of 3.
Peeling a small puffball. Came off like a rubber shower cap. 3 of 3.
To prepare you'll usually slice slabs or "steaks" off the mushroom, around ¼" to ½" in thickness. I think the best tool to use to slice puffballs is a sharp fish filleting knife. The cuts made with a fillet knife make a smoother and more even cut through the mushroom. Most everyone I know cooks puffballs one of two ways: one, lightly salt and pepper the slice, and saute in oil and/or butter until golden brown, or two, coat with a milk/egg wash before dusting with salted and peppered flour and frying in oil. Either of these methods is simple, easy and reliably delicious. If you use a flour coating you can of course also play with the spicing of the flour, adding things like cayenne, garlic powder or whatever suits your fancy. I like to add a pinch of fresh nutmeg to the flour, but don't ever overdo the spice lest the delicate flavor of the mushroom be overpowered.
Breakfast of scrambled eggs and fried breaded puffball mushroom.
Fried or sauteed puffball has a consistency and texture I'd liken to tofu. But of course the flavor is uniquely its own. You can also dice the puffball and add to soups or rice and risotto dishes. Another interesting and fun way we've used puffballs is as sandwich filling, sauteing puffball slices and adding to turkey sandwiches or to BLTs for a whole new spin on those classic sandwiches.
However you choose to prepare it, when you bring home a big puffball mushroom that you saw and snagged on the way home or discovered while intentionally foraging for them, you can be assured that you will get a lot of oohs and aahs and curious comments about this strange, large white ball of mushroomy goodness.