Candy Cap Braised Pork

Most recipes for candy cap mushrooms are sweet pastries, puddings, and other desserts. Yet candy caps, with their essence of maple syrup, also demand to be paired with pig. Having made the classic baked treat à la fungi—Candy Cap Cookies—I decided to switch my experiments to something savory (though a Candy Cap Bread Pudding sounds pretty good, too).

So I went to my local meat shop and got a little more than three pounds of pork shoulder, which the butcher kindly cut into large chunks. This was a start. I wasn't sure where I was going but Indian spices seemed like a reasonable next step, and maybe some dried prunes to accentuate the sweetness of the mushrooms and perhaps a splash or two (or three) of port wine. Yes, these ingredients would work together. With a nod to typical French braising, I added carrots and onions, but the final cilantro garnish would make it clear that this was not a dish with two feet in the Western culinary canon—more like a straddling of East and West.

Here, then, is a simple recipe built around dried candy cap mushrooms that is not a dessert.

1 cup dried candy caps, rehydrated with a 1 1/2 cups warm water
3 lbs boneless pork shoulder, cut into large chunks
2 tbsp olive oil
1 yellow onion, sliced into half moons
2 - 3 carrots, sliced into rounds
1 dozen prunes
1 cup port
2 bay leaves

Rub
1 tbsp garam masala
1 tsp salt
1 tsp coriander
1 tsp curry powder
1 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 tsp white pepper
1/2 tsp turmeric

1. In a medium sized bowl, rehydrate 1 cup dried candy cap mushrooms in enough warm water to cover, about 1 1/2 cups, for 20 minutes. Remove mushrooms and wring out excess liquid back into bowl. Soak prunes in stock.

2. Meanwhile, pre-heat oven to 325 degrees. Mix together rub ingredients and apply to pork chunks. Heat olive oil in a dutch oven or casserole over medium-high flame and brown meat, in batches if necessary.

3. Remove meat and add onions and carrots. Lower heat to medium and cook several minutes, stirring, until vegetables begin to soften. Add prunes, mushrooms, bay leaves, stock, and wine. Bring to a boil and return meat to pot. Spoon some of the vegetables on top. Liquid should mostly cover the meat but not entirely. Cover and put in oven for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, stirring occasionally, until meat falls apart.

The maple syrupy mushrooms marry nicely with the Indian spices. Substitute red or white wine for the port if you prefer. The finished pork, falling apart among bright orange bobs of stewed carrot, begs for a bright green garnish of cilantro—and I might have added a dollop of Greek yogurt on top if I'd had any. Served over this couscous, the meal was perfect for a wet winter evening.

And it just got better the next day: pulled pork sandwiches!

New Classes Announced

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be returning again this year to Bainbridge Island Parks & Recreation to teach foraging classes. To see class descriptions, click here and scroll down to pages 35 -36 to "Bounty of the Land." You can also find updated class listings (plus readings, lectures, and so on)  posted in the right column of this blog near the top, under the heading "Upcoming Events & Classes."

Spring classes scheduled so far:

• March 28, Stinging Nettles: We'll divide our time between the field and the kitchen, foraging tasty and nutritious stinging nettles and then preparing a delicious recipe.
• April 7, Shellfish: Learn how to dig clams, shuck oysters, and cook a gourmet meal right on the beach.
• May 7, Shellfish: Learn how to dig clams, shuck oysters, and cook a gourmet meal right on the beach.

Additionally, I'll be offering my wild edible nature walk again this spring, an easy 3-hour ramble in a state park near Seattle. Stay tuned for dates.

Candy Cap Cookies

Ever eaten mushroom cookies? Nah, not that kind. These cookies will only give you a sugar high.

This is a post I meant to write more than a year ago, after making a trip to Mendocino at the end of November, just as the California mushroom season was hitting its stride and Washington State was nodding off for the season. Here we are little more than a year later in the same place: my home turf is only putting out a few yellowfoot chanterelles (I found some on a walk the other day, which went well with the Christmas stuffing), while to the south you might get into some late matsutake, hedgehogs, and that headliner of winter mushrooms, the black trumpet. Another coastal species to keep an eye out for: the candy cap.

Candy caps (Lactarius rubidus) are smallish gilled mushrooms that bleed a latex-like fluid when cut, a characteristic of the Lactarius genus. In the case of candy caps, the fluid is only slightly lactic, with a thin, watery skim milk consistency. The mushrooms are generally orangish to cinnamon-colored and hollow-stemmed—not exactly useful identifiers for West Coast species of Lactarius, since there are many that fit this bill, most of which you wouldn't want to eat. The best field mark I've come across involves touch. Run a finger over the pileus of a candy cap and feel a cool, slightly bumpy texture, not unlike a tangerine peel. The sweet smell is another characteristic, though not diagnostic.

I've never seen candy caps in Washington. Their strike zone seems to be the coastal mixed forests of Northern California, where I've found them among redwoods and Douglas-fir interspersed with oaks and madrones, usually in damp areas with lots of moss and decaying wood, often near forest edges, trails, and road cuts. In Mendocino, with my friend Sinclair Philip, who took the photo at left, I found good quantities fruiting near a stream in open, park-like woods behind a regional hospital.

Mushrooms, with their deep umami, are generally thought of in terms of savory dishes. A few species, notably those in the Cantharellaceae family such as chanterelles and black trumpets, exude a hint of stone fruit that is unusual in the fungal kingdom, but only rarely do mushrooms land on the dessert menu. The candy cap, as its common name suggests, is a break from this tradition. Its singular culinary attribute is most obvious after the mushroom has been dried: an aroma redolent of maple syrup.

I found enough candy caps on my 2010 trip to play around in the kitchen, but it was Nate Segraves at the Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz who kindly set me up with a mason jar full of dried candy caps to do some serious experimentation. For the usual reasons, that experimentation didn't find a vent until this past week. My first attempt was a simple cookie recipe from David Arora's All that the Rain Promises, a classic way to use candy caps (recipe below).

I've also enjoyed the candy cap in a martini served by chef Chris Czarnecki at the Joel Palmer House while dining with his father, Jack. And I plan to use my candy cap stock to make a sauce at some point soon, maybe with slow-cooked pork shoulder. A quick word to the wise, though: my own experience suggests that you should try to use your dried candy caps within a year; unlike dried morels or porcini, which only get better with age, candy caps seem to lose some of their maple syrupy kick over time.

Back to the confections. This is a basic refrigerator cookie recipe that's goosed with candy caps—a good way to showcase the unusual flavor of the mushrooms. Share these with your friends and then casually mention, after they've tucked into a few, that the star ingredient is fungi.

1 cup dried candy cap mushrooms
1 cup butter, softened, plus extra for sauté
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 cups flour, sifted
1/2 cup toasted pecans, chopped

1. Rehydrate dried mushrooms for 20 minutes in enough warm water to cover. Wring out excess liquid, pat dry with paper towel, chop, and sauté several minutes with a nob of butter over medium heat. Save stock for another use.

2. Cream together butter and sugar. Beat in egg and vanilla. Slowly add flour while stirring, then chopped nuts and sautéed candy caps.

3. Roll cookie dough into three logs, each about 1 1/2 inches in diameter. I use wax paper and a sushi roller. Wrap logs in wax paper and freeze.

4. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Slice cookies about 1/4 inch thick and place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 8 - 10 minutes until bottoms of cookies are golden brown.

Serve to mycophobic friends with a tall glass of milk.

Loss of a Friend

My friend Christina Choi passed away yesterday.

Christina was a nurturing soul who loved to feed people with her food, warmth, and good spirit. During its brief run, her restaurant Nettletown in Seattle developed a devoted following and probably offered the highest ratio of wild to conventional food of any regularly operating restaurant in the country. To eat at Nettletown was to know exactly what was growing wild at that very moment somewhere in the mountains, woods, or river valleys just beyond the city. This was one of the reasons why you had to be back next week—there was always something new coming into season, prepared in an unfussy way that allowed the ingredient's singular qualities to shine.

Another reason was Christina herself. The kitchen couldn't contain her. She needed to come out and visit with her customers—and we needed to bask in her glowing presence.

One time I brought a class of high schoolers to Nettletown. All week we had been foraging for wild foods as part of a week-long experiential course, in the Cascades, along the shore, even in a Seattle park. Our visit to Nettletown was a reward of sorts for the effort the students had put into the class and also a reminder of how food brings people together. Christina looked tired to me that day and I was worried about her. The hurly-burly of the restaurant business seemed to be taking a toll. Nevertheless, she rose to the occasion, coming out of her busy kitchen to spend time with the kids. She talked passionately about the various wild foods on the menu and where they came from, their high nutritious value and unique flavors. Afterward, on the bus ride back to school, several of the students told me how much of an impression Christina had made on them. "She's rad," one tenth grader said—high praise.

I usually visited Nettletown with my notebook and camera. My plan was to write a comprehensive post about this unlikely restaurant and its food over the course of a year's seasons, highlighting many of my favorite dishes. But just as soon as the experiment had begun, it was over. The restaurant closed at the end of August this year. In some ways I wasn't surprised. When I asked Christina about it, she said she was exhausted and needed to take care of her health. Like her cooking, she was direct, honest, and true to herself.

After months of not feeling like her usual self, Christina finally saw a neurologist. On December 12 she was diagnosed with a 5-cm brain aneurysm and went into surgery two days later. As feared, the aneurysm burst during surgery, and more complications followed. She died on December 28 while surrounded by the love of her family. She was 34.

We will miss you, Christina, the many of us who you nurtured with your food and kindness.

Truffle Time

The holiday season isn't just about turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. It's also peak time for truffles. And few foods can make us swoon like these odd fungal tubers. Properly prepared, they might be the sexiest of all our ingredients, evoking even more intense longing than oysters or chocolate. But how many people in this country, even food-obsessed people, can say they've had a mind-blowing truffle experience? Part of the problem is that we don't have a truffle culture here in the U.S. comparable to the truffle cultures of France or Italy. Home cooks don't know how to shop for truffles or how to prepare them—and, sadly, neither do many restaurateurs, for that matter.

Next month I plan to attend the Oregon Truffle Festival, ground zero for the emerging homegrown truffle culture. The festival is in its seventh year and will feature an assortment of events, from meals and cooking demos to a forum for would-be truffle farmers. My friend Jack Czarnecki will be cooking up some serious truffle fare with his son Chris, chef-owner of Willamette Valley's famed Joel Palmer House. Other luminaries include Jim Trappe, one of the authors of the Field Guide to North American Truffles, Molly O'Neil, the former New York Times food columnist, and numerous guest chefs, including Josh Feathers of Tennessee's Blackberry Farm and  Robin Jackson of the Sooke Harbour House in Sooke, B.C., among others. There's even a truffle dog-training seminar.

Oregon truffle country is also wine country

A quick primer: truffles are ectomycorrhizal fungi that partner with certain species of trees (Douglas-firs for the edible varieties in the Pacific Northwest) in mutually beneficial relationships that involve the exchange of nutrients and water. The truffle's reproductive strategy is to produce a scent irresistible to certain mammals (e.g., voles, flying squirrels...and humans) that will hungrily dig up the truffle, eat it, and spread its spores.

Describing truffles is no easy task. They're not much to look at. But, oh, that aroma... It's musky, sometimes fruity or garlicky, always earthy and, for lack of a better word, funky. Some would say it's an aroma more appropriate to a honeymoon suite than a dining room table.

For those who want to forage their own, I'd recommend training your dog. I've foraged truffles with and without dogs and can report that my success rate went up exponentially with the hound. Sniffing out truffles is no problem for canine smellers, and generally the truffles will be of better quality, which is to say, riper.

Jack Czarnecki with fresh truffles

And therein lies the main problem facing our native truffle industry: too many unripe truffles are being foraged and sold to consumers who don't know any better. Case in point: A friend of mine bought a local black truffle at a Seattle market the other day and showed it to me proudly. She had big plans for the truffle. I took a whiff. Nothing. The truffle had absolutely no aroma whatsoever. "Take it back and demand a refund," I told her. She was crestfallen, her dinner plans thwarted.

Be sure to examine your truffle before buying. It should be dry, firm, and pungent. Black truffles, to my nose, smell fruity, somewhat like overripe pineapple, with a distinctly fungal underpinning that is strange and beguiling. White truffles are more garlicky and can pack a wallop. Like other complex foods (e.g., wine, chocolate), the taste and aroma will vary for individual palates. Some people go to pieces in the presence of truffles, while others wonder why the fuss.

Once your truffle is conveyed safely home you'll need to take precautions in serving it. Slice it thinly over hot food. A little goes a long way. Simply shaved over buttered pasta is a classic way to enjoy the singular essence of truffles. The heat of the pasta reacts with the truffle and the fat in the butter serves to absorb the flavor. Prolonged cooking, on the other hand, will destroy the delicate molecular design of its scent. I don't understand recipes that call for inserting slivers of truffle in a piece of meat before roasting. The cooking process will likely obliterate the truffle flavor—but perhaps there are ways to pull off such a feat. I'll be sure to report back on what I learn about cooking with truffles at the Oregon Truffle Festival.

Eat Your Weedies

Is wild food the new pork belly? My Google alert for "foraging" dings nearly every day with a fresh article on the joys of finding and cooking wild edibles. The New Yorker jumped on the bandwagon recently in their annual food issue with a piece by Jane Kramer in which she forages her way across Europe. The last 18 months have seen the publication of foraging guide books by my pal Hank Shaw with Hunt, Gather, Cook (reviewed here) and Sam Thayer's Nature's Garden (reviewed here); a memoir, The Feast Nearby, by Robin Mather; and Connie Green's cookbook The Wild Table.

Is any of this ink actually getting people into the outdoors to interact with their landscape and maybe find a bit of dinner? It's hard to know. There's a learning curve, after all, which is a hurdle in an era of instant gratification and short attention spans. Certainly there is no single resource that can put you on the trail to wild harvesting. Some of the books out there, such as Thayer's, are broad field guides that will only be partly useful in any given region; others, such as Shaw's, are part field guide and part inspiration to give you a kick in the pants;  the recipe books mostly work in the kitchen; and the memoirs are strictly food for thought.

Would-be foragers who I've met over the years seem most intimidated by issues of identification and processing. Enter John Kallas and his new "Wild Food Adventure Series." His first volume in what  promises to be a collection of related titles is Edible Wild Plants: Wild Foods from Dirt to Plate. Newbies looking for a single resource to get started will be well served by this jam-packed book. It's extremely detailed yet limited in scope. The book only covers a handful of plant species that are common throughout most of North America. More advanced foragers might be put off (only 20 species?) but beginners will be thankful for the depth that replaces breadth.

Kallas spotlights those ubiquitous globetrotting wild edibles common to backyard, field margin, abandoned lot, and even sidewalk crack: the weeds. And not even all the usual weeds. Stinging nettles, for instance, don't make the cut. Kallas does cover other common weeds, from lambsquarters (called wild spinach here) to purslane, and wintercress to shepherd's purse. These are truly omnipresent plants that should be on every forager's menu. Many of these species will be familiar right away while others might trigger a memory of this or that unidentified weed that landed in your compost. Thumbing through these pages you might have the sudden realization that the giant spiny thing growing from your neighbor's planting strip is a sow thistle—a highly nutritious plant that, when "managed appropriately," can be used in any preparation calling for collard greens.

Edible Wild Plants is divided into four categories that set expectations for taste: mild foundation greens (e.g., chickweed, mallow), tart greens (docks and sorrels), pungent greens (mustards), and bitter greens (dandelions, nipplewort). Entries for each species are detailed, including notes on identification, nutrition, and lifecycle. There are sub-sections for the different anatomical parts of the plant at various stages of life cycle: roots, sprouts, leaves, stems, buds, flowers, and seeds. Each stage of growth is described. Photos accompany all these stages and parts. There are additional sections on harvesting, processing, and cooking, with recipes. The entry on field mustard, for example, is more than 20 pages and includes instructions on harvesting both the vegetable-like flower buds and the seeds used for making the condiment mustard. There are even range maps.

I'm often asked about the sustainability of foraging. Obviously, if everyone went clamming tomorrow, the shellfish beds would be quickly depleted. But weeds are another story. The planet would be no worse off today if every American harvested weeds for the table this past Thanksgiving. This makes Kallas's introductory guide book a healthy addition to any forager's library.

Winter Mushrooms

It's not officially winter yet but we had a hard frost in Seattle the other morning and I-90 was closed at Snoqualmie Pass due to heavy snowfall. Most mushroom hunters figure, "Put a fork in the season. It's done."

Not so. This is the time of year to find cold-loving species such as hedgehogs and winter chanterelles (aka yellowfoot). Look for them in wet coastal woods where there's plenty of decay.

Recently I went picking with a friend on the Olympic Peninsula. Though not an epic year for late-season mushrooms (or any mushrooms, for that matter), we found decent numbers of bellybutton hedgehogs (Hydnum umbilicatum, pictured above and left) and spreader hedgehogs (Hydnum repandum). They're easily told apart. The bellybuttons are smaller, with proportionally longer stems and an "inny" of a bellybutton at the center of the cap, technically referred to as umbilicate. The spreaders can be much larger, with caps that develop scales or cracks. Both are delicious, with spicy hints of black pepper, nutmeg, and cardamon. Being fairly cold-tolerant, they'll last a long time in your fridge, too, often more than a week.

Yellowfoot chanterelles (above), also known as winter chanterelles, are not actually in the chanterelle genus; rather, they're considered a species of Craterellus, the same genus as black trumpets, and like that mushroom, they too are hollow, though with chanterelle-like ridges underneath the cap. In the Pacific Northwest our species is currently called Craterellus tubaeformis but may be changed to C. neotubaeformis as it appears to differ from the species found in the Eastern U.S. and Europe. Either way, yellowfoots have good chanterelle-like flavor despite their insubstantial size, and when they're on, you can pick them by the handful.

Recently I made two appetizer dishes with winter mushrooms. One was a crostini with yellowfoot and chicken liver. The other was a very rich and savory mushroom parfait of sautéed hedgehogs and yellowfoot with wheat berries and mascarpone.

The crostini was inspired by a meal I had at Jeremy Faber's house. Jeremy is the owner of Foraged and Found Edibles in Seattle and I think he served this dish because I had been bad-mouthing yellowfoots as soggy, tasteless chanterelle wannabes. He showed me that with the right approach, you can actually get a lot of flavor out of them, and despite the flimsy, wet noodle posture, they have good texture when properly cooked.

Brown a small handful of chicken liver in vegetable oil. Remove from the pan and crumble with the help of a potato masher. In the same pan, sauté a few big handfuls of whole yellowfoot mushrooms and deglaze with a healthy splash of soy sauce. Cook the mushrooms down in the soy until they release all their water and they're brown. They'll look almost like weird, squid-like tentacles. No need to add salt because the soy will be plenty salty; in fact, you might want to use a low-sodium variety. Mix back in the crumbled liver and serve over sliced and toasted baguette with a sprinkling of chopped parsley. The result is a serious umami bomb.

For the parfait, first prepare the wheat berries on the stove top. No matter how long you cook them they'll retain an al dente texture. I used three cups of chicken stock for a cup of berries and simmered in excess of an hour. This was much more than I needed. Next sauté a half-pound of chopped hedgehog and yellowfoot mushrooms in butter with a generous variety of chopped herbs (I used thyme, sage, and oregano). Season to taste. Remove to a bowl and mix in a few dollops of mascarpone. The mixture should be super creamy. Now mix in enough wheat berries so that the ratio is about 3:1 in favor of mushrooms. Serve in goblets with a sprinkling of chives on top.

The season's not over for those of us north of Oregon. Get out there and find some mushrooms.

Huckleberry Egg Custard

The other day while mushroom hunting out on the Olympic Peninsula, I came across some huckleberry patches that were absolutely loaded with ripe berries. My daughter is a huckleberry fanatic. She eats hucks with her pancakes, in her yogurt, over ice cream. Score!

I surprised Ruby with my huckleberry haul when she got home from school. We made egg custards for dessert and topped them with the fresh hucks. To be honest, I had never actually made an egg custard before, but after eating one of Donald Link's creamy, southern-style custards this summer while he was visiting Seattle for his "Taste of Place" webcast, I knew I wanted to add this simple dessert to the repertoire.

For that custard, Chef Donald used red huckleberries we picked together in the Cascades foothills in the middle of summer. Here it was nearly the end of mushroom season and we were still able to forage fresh huckleberries. This is a good example of why it's useful to recognize a variety of species in any particular genus. In Washington State we have 13 species of Vaccinium. Those in the know can pick ripe huckleberries as early as July and as late as December.

The evergreen huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum) is an important species for us West Coasters. It's a lowland coastal variety, and it's usually the last of the huckleberries to fruit, often when other species are covered in snow. Clearcuts are a good place to find them, and anywhere else where they can get ample sun. They fruit in clusters, which means the picking is faster than it is with red huckleberries or mountain varieties. Some pickers use a bucket and simply shake the huckleberries off the branch.

More than likely, when you get your evergreen huckleberries home you'll also have a potpourri of twigs, leaves, and maybe a spider or two. The easiest way to clean your berries is to place them on a tray in batches, angle the tray slightly downward toward a colander, and start massaging the berries with the open palm of your hand. Roll them around so they part with their stems. Clean berries will roll down the tray and collect in the colander. Smashed berries, stems, and forest debris will remain on the tray.

The egg custard itself is simple as can be.

1 cup evaporated milk
1 cup water
4 egg yolks
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup huckleberries
fresh nutmeg or cinnamon, grated to taste

1. Pre-heat over to 325 degrees. Combine milk and water in a small saucepan and bring to boil.

2. Mix egg yolks, sugar, salt, and vanilla together in a bowl.

3. Slowly whisk in hot milk-water mixture until frothy. Pour into 4 ramekins.

4. Place ramekins in an oven-proof dish or tray filled with warm water. Bake for 40 minutes. Carefully place a small handful of huckleberries atop each custard and bake another 10 minutes. Test one for doneness with a knife tip; if it comes away clean, the custard is done. Sprinkle with fresh nutmeg or cinnamon. Serve hot or cold.

Sichuan Chicken & Matsutake with Vinegar

To spend several days with matsutake pickers in Oregon and not come home with even a flag for my efforts was something of a dropped ball. So I spent a day at the coast yesterday picking yellowfoot and hedgehogs plus a few lingering kings and chanterelles—and a surprise late flush of matsi. Yes!

They were fruiting on the edges of an old railroad grade in private timberlands where the steam donkeys once worked. The rusted donkeys are mostly gone now—scrapped by tweakers who have already stolen every catalytic converter they can scrounge—but the Aloha Tavern still waits faithfully at the edge of the cut, a plume of smoke curling out of its wood stove chimney, serving Busch tallboys at the end of the day beneath the conniving grin of the shake rat.

Apparently the coastal matsutake have been infested with cap-worms in a big way this year, but I got lucky with a bunch of nice, fat worm-free mushrooms.

Every fall I develop more appreciation for this truly singular mushroom. Recently I learned why I like it more in Eastern preparations than in Western: unlike mushrooms favored by French, Italian, and other Western culinary traditions (think porcini, chanterelle, morel), the flavors in matsutake are water-soluble (as opposed to fat soluble). This is why these mushrooms respond so well to soy, sake, and rice vinegar rather than butter, cream, and cheese.

When matsutake is on the menu I usually stick to traditional Japanese dishes, such as Sukiyaki and Gohan. This time I went with spicy Sichuan.

For those keeping score at home, since picking up a copy a year ago I've been working my way through Fuchsia Dunlop's Land of Plenty, a treasure trove of Sichuan recipes, adding my own forager's twist. Let's see. So far I've made Fish-fragrant Geoduck with Morels, Dry-fried Chicken with Fiddleheads, Sea-flavored Noodles with Porcini, and a few Kung Pao dinner party dishes with geoducks and morels that disappeared before I could get photographs for the blog.

This recipe is based on Dunlop's Chicken with Vinegar, with a few tweaks. Obviously the inclusion of matsutake is the biggest change. Also, I added dried red chili peppers and substituted chili bean sauce for pickled chili paste (which I'd like to try next time). The textures of the three main ingredients—chicken, matsutake, and celery—work in harmony, with all of them velvety smooth but with varying resistance to the tooth. The egg-battered chicken is tender as all get-out, and the matsutake mushrooms make an aromatic accompaniment that is in keeping with the original recipe, their spicy flavor mixing with the chili peppers and black vinegar in a way that amplifies the overall dish.

I guess everyone liked it because there were no leftovers.

1 lb chicken breast, cut into 1/2-inch by 1-inch pieces
1/2 lb (or more) matsutake, sliced 1/4-inch thin by 1-inch
3 celery stalks, diced into 1/2-inch pieces
1 heaping tbsp garlic, diced
1 heaping tbsp ginger, diced
2 tbsp chili bean sauce
2 scallions, thinly sliced
1 handful dried red chili peppers
1 1/2 cups peanut oil

Marinade
1 1/2 tsp Shaoxing rice wine
1/2 tsp salt

Batter
2 tbsp egg white
3 tbsp cornstarch

Sauce
1 1/2 tsp white sugar
2 tsp Chinese black vinegar
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp Shaoxing rice wine
1 1/2 tsp cornstarch
3 tbsp chicken stock

1. After dicing chicken, mix with marinade in a bowl. Set aside.

2. Mix the sauce in a small bowl.

3. Add batter ingredients to marinated chicken and stir well in one direction.

4. Heat 1 1/2 cups peanut oil in wok over medium flame. Add the chicken and then the celery. Prod with chopstick to eparate chicken pieces and cook until just white. Remove chicken and celery from wok with slotted spoon. Drain all but 2 to 3 tablespoons of oil.

5. Return wok to high heat and add matsutake. Cook 5 minutes or so, stirring occasionally, and then remove with a slotted spoon.

6. Add chili sauce to wok, stirring, and cook 30 seconds. Stir in garlic, ginger, and chili peppers and cook another 30 seconds before returning chicken, celery, and matsutake to wok. Give the sauce a quick stir and add to wok. Cook all together another minute or two until sauce thickens. Serve immediately over rice.

Serves 4 with rice and another dish.

Matsutake Camp

This past weekend I traveled down to Oregon with photographer Eirik Johnson (check out his work here) to pitch my tent at a matsutake camp in the Central Cascades of Oregon, on the edge of the high windblown desert. (More on the unlikely setting later.)

We stayed at the smaller camp in the woods near Crescent Lake, where a mushroom buyer named Joy was kind enough to give us space behind his buy station. That night pickers trickled back into camp to sell their day's work to Joy, who was paying 20/20—twenty dollars a pound for both #1 and #2 matsutake buttons. The former (pictured at top) has an intact veil covering the gills—the preference of well-heeled customers in Japan, where these mushrooms were destined—while the latter is slightly marred by a small hole in the veil, as shown (barely) below if you click on the image. In any event, both grades fetch the same price in a year such as this, when the picking is poor and mushrooms are in demand.

That night we hung out by the fire with a couple pickers from Weed, California. Som, Laotian by birth, first started picking matsutake in the Crescent Lake area as a teenager with his mother. He'd been in camp since the highly regulated season opened after Labor Day. His dog Whiskey guarded the shelter by day.

Som's friend Forrest, pictured below with his day's pay, was picking for the first time since his usual construction work has dwindled. He told us the learning curve was steep—something we would learn firsthand the next day when we went picking with Joy and his kids.

Sometime after dark a refrigerated truck stopped at the buy station to collect 260 pounds of matsutake and drive it to Portland where it would be processed (cleaned and packed) and air-freighted to Japan so that the matsutake-crazed customers of that small island nation could shop for inividually-wrapped buttons at the market. Last year the nightly poundage at Joy's station might have been five times more.

I've picked plenty of matsutake in the past closer to home, which I usually cook in a traditional Japanese-style sukiyaki. But here on the edge of the desert the picking is entirely different. Whereas I look for mature fir trees in the North Cascades, most of the picking at Crescent Lake is in pine: lodgepole and ponderosa, with a smattering of Douglas-fir and true firs. In some cases the tree composition is all pine and the conditions surprisingly dry.

Matsutake, however, thrive in sandy soils, and the pumice-laden soil in this volcanically active area provides ideal habitat. Mount Mazama's eruption nearly 7,700 years ago created Crater Lake and dumped three to five feet of pumice on the surrounding hills. Though the ground appears dry and dusty, the pine needle duff holds enough moisture to promote great fruitings. Joy said that Japanese customers appreciate the chewy texture of high desert Oregon matsutake.

Picking matsutake in the pine forests around Lake Crescent on a year such as this, when the pick is small, is not for beginners like Forrest (though he was fortunate to have an expert mentor in Som). In a normal year a matsutake patch will announce itself with "flags" or "flowers"—fully emerged mushrooms that indicate the presence of smaller buttons hiding under the duff. This year even the #6 flowers were commanding a decent price, meaning everything was getting picked. And experienced pickers who knew how to find the concealed buttons were being careful to "control" their patches, as a buyer named Leo explained to me, by picking everything to eliminate any evidence of fruiting mushrooms and then visiting regularly to catch the buttons before they emerged.

Finding a matsutake button beneath the duff on a forest floor otherwise devoid of any sign of fungi, indeed a floor without a single mushroom anywhere in sight, is an art form. Joy showed us how it was done. He carefully scanned the ground of a known patch before pausing over what to me was an imperceptible rise in the duff. Using a metal staff that resembled a tire iron, he scraped away a small amount of forest debris to reveal the white cap of a matsutake button. He picked it stem and all without trimming anything (Japanese customers want the dirt attached at the end, as this signifies life force). Later, when I tried to find matsutake on my own in a stretch of woods filled with pickers, I got completely blanked.

Unlike Joy, Som, and Forrest, who prefer camping in the woods, most of the pickers and buyers are now based out of the town of Chemult, 20 miles down the road from Crescent Junction, where several business owners in town rent space for mushroom camps. Pickers and buyers have moved here in recent years to avoid onerous fees levied first by the Forest Service and now Hoodoo, a private concessionairre. Hoodoo has since cut its prices, but it may be too late to lure the pickers away from the comforts of town, which include electricity and nearby groceries.

Margins are thin in the wild mushroom trade and costs can be shaved in other interesting ways. One buyer in Chemult operated out of a shipping container.

We were lucky enough to visit the night of a big celebration in support of a Buddhist temple in Springfield, Oregon, where many of the Southeast Asian pickers live. Lao, Hmong, Mien, and Cambodian pickers celebrated by slaughtering a cow and then feasting on a dinner of beef tripe soup, beef larb, sticky rice, and barbecued ribs. A Laotian pop star stopped by en route during a U.S. concert tour to entertain. Even Buddhist monks were on hand to offer blessings.

Much has been said about the Wild West nature of the Crescent Lake and Chemult matsutake scene. Indeed, I heard many stories around the fire, stories for another time. Suffice it to say that I was impressed by the skill of the pickers and the sense of community that attends this unusual stop on the mushroom trail.