Quote:
Originally Posted by Victor Sack[_1_]
Melba's Jammin' wrote:
Bubba Vic, I know you treasure the rehydrating liquid from dried
mushrooms. Is it the kind of thing to use generously or to use
sparingly? Do I want to freeze 1/4 cup portions or, say, 1 cup
portions? All I can think to do with it is to add it to the liquid or
drippings for gravy making.
Very little water is needed to rehydrate dried mushrooms. Using a lot
of water makes little sense. I use the resulting liquid in the dish in
which the mushrooms are used. The mushrooms themselves will inevitably
have more intensive taste than their rehydrating liquid, no matter how
concentrated.
Recently, I cooked sauerkraut schi, the most Russian soup of them all.
Regardless, I'd guess that 99% of modern Russians have never tasted real
schi. First, I prepared sauerkraut. I put it in a pot with some minced
onions, a few slices of parsley root and a couple of pats of clarified
butter. I put the pot in the very slow oven (ca. 110°C/225°F) for about
4 hours, imitating the conditions of the Russian oven. Occasionally, I
checked if the sauerkraut was getting burned or just too dry, in which
case I added a couple of spoons of sauerkraut juice, stirring the
sauerkraut. Once the kraut was ready, I put the pot outside, to freeze
the kraut (the temperatures were below freezing until today) overnight.
This is important, as it changes the taste of sauerkraut quite a bit.
The next day, I cooked the broth with a piece of beef shank, a couple of
pieces of brisket (about 1 kg/2.2 pounds of meat total), onions, parsley
root, celery root, and carrot for about 3 hours, strained it, cut the
meat in pieces and combined it with the thawed sauerkraut, the meat cut
in pieces, a handful of rehydrated porcini together with their soaking
liquid, and continued to cook over low heat for about 40 minutes.
Served it with dill, minced garlic and sour cream. This kind of soup
can be - and in fact used to be - eaten every day, sometimes more than
once a day. I have here a September food schedule of Novospassky
Monastery from the year 1648. Schi of some kind were served at least
once, often twice, every single day.
Victor |
Ooo! Thanks for this recipe. I still know some Polish folks who make stuff like this. My personal favorite is a creamy soup made of boletes (may favorite mushroom). Can't remember the name, though.
Just to touch on the water to mushroom ratio. The general rule in mushroom dehydration (in terms of mass) is 10:1. I suppose, in a perfect universe, one would measure the mass of the dried mushrooms and use ten times that in water mass. We all know, though, that all that water may not be absorbed. Who cares, though? Save the water for cooking and resulting sediment, and toss it in the yard. Spores are very resilient, unbeknownst to Sheldon, and 3,000 year-old , viable spores have been found in sealed vaults in the great pyramids. Let 'em do their thing. If higher heat was used to dehydrate the mushrooms, most of the spores may be knocked off. But I'd bet some survival-of-the-fittest could go on. I'll bet the nice folks of Slovakia stick to older tried-and-true methods of air drying them and that these spores might find a happy place in your yard. If the Slovak mushrooms happen to be (king or edulis) boletes, then they can handle pine needles to oak leaves as substrate, and they are just awesome in size and flavor. If you'll look at the underside of the cap, there will be pinholes instead of gills if they are boletes.
Polish people, where I grew up, collected several species of mushrooms that are inedible without preparation (lactarius, clitocybe and leucopaxillus) and they prepared them in a manner similar to sauerkraut. The resulting flavor, though, is a more acrid, peppery, flavor. Also, with acrid mushrooms, they would dry them and use the pulverized dried mushrooms as a condiment like black pepper. I have done this and found the lactarius on my neighbor's land perfect for this use. I've tried it with success with clitocybes years ago, but haven't found them in abundance since I moved to where I currently reside. It's a different kind of pepper and the best thing to put on a pizza, IMO.
I guess my only food goal in this new year is to try this recipe, Victor. Thank you.