I am a huge mushroom picking enthusiast, it's been one of my favourite things to do since I was a kid. It's like finding real life treasure. And for 2025 it looks like the best time of the year has begun!
I have a spot or spots for most of my fav mushrooms and the chantarelles came weeks early this year, in abundance I've never seen before in my life! Here's a pic from the spot, everywhere was like this. We picked a big basket and two big bucketfulls in just a few hours two weeks ago.
Chantarelles in particular are both sort of amazing and annoying in how much manual labor they take to clean and prepare, each goes through human hands at least two or three times. It's been raining a lot and these were very wet and dirty. We processed them by cleaning by hand first and then washed them as there were lots of sand in them.
This is the haul after we ate a bunch fried on sourdough bread at the picking site:
After this we processed them in the oven so we can freeze them. They had so much water in them. I find that chantarelles do best if you freeze them, trumpet chantarelles & boletus are amazing dried. The oven method retains flavour and shape better imo than getting the water out in a pan.
The final pile ready to freeze was 3,1kg. It always blows my mind how little comes out of so much.
We have been eating them almost daily. Mostly with new potatoes and some protein and a salad. Tomorrow I'm making pizza from them.
Here is a very common way of eating these around here. The patty is made from free range highlander beef & black beans:
To be continued...
The shroom brick looks like this when pulled out of the freezer:
As they unfreeze and start to fry they separate and retain their shroomy shape quite nicely. I like to add a bit of olive oil, butter, onion and garlic to the pan as they start to fry.
Today I made spinach crepes (euro pancakes) with letfover sourdough starter and spelt flour and stuffed them with chantarelle sauce. On the side I served mashed lingonberries, their tartness goes great with the richness of the chantarelle sauce and crepe.
If it wasn't so hot and humid, I'd go out to see if the boletus are already coming up. I suspect they might, if they are premature the same as chantarelles.
Drying boletus always makes the house smell pretty funky, but it's so worth it. It's the shit when it comes to umami. Nothing like a risotto with dried boletus.
The chantarelles could go into a soup or a savory pie after the pizza, not sure yet. I know we should not eat these every day as they can contain a bit of radiation, but it's hard to care when they are so delicious and also free.