Giant Puffballs - Foraging, Cooking and Tasting

so i'm at the orchard of a couple of friends of ours julia and steve this morning and julia texted me last night to say that she found something quite exciting in the woods alongside the orchard so let's go inside the woods and have a look now you can probably see already what it is so there's another one over there and there's another one there and two here and this is the giant puffball lan germany gigantea one of the most unmistakable wild mushrooms or wild fungi don't suppose we can really call it a mushroom because it's not really mushroom shape but so there it is and so the specimen we're looking at here is probably pretty much at the limit of size for edibility it's about the span of my hand so maybe seven inches in diameter just smaller than a football really and they do get a lot bigger than this now they get so big that apparently they've been mistaken for sheep because they usually grow in open grassy areas um i don't know who mistook them for sheep that's not important it's a story but yeah that's about the biggest you can get and still have them edible really they're better picked a bit smaller than that but we're fortunate because there are four specimens at least locally here probably more if we looked around after they get bigger than this they start to turn into spores inside and of course that's how the fungus reproduces so we're going to pick one of these today and we're going to make breaded giant puffball sandwiches also interesting to note that there is a badger set in here so there is an active family of badgers living in amongst these woods here which is good to see so let's have a look and see which one of these looks the best for harvesting they're always a little bit nibbled on the outside like this that's kind of unavoidable so we're going to be cutting those nibbled bits off and using the cleaner flesh inside the fungus so that one feels nice and firm but i think we might have one of these smaller ones here because there is such a lot of flesh inside these things a bit of weird dirt embedded in it so i think this might be the one we have doesn't feel quite as firm as that one so yeah i think we probably have this one here and let's go and prepare that for the table so i think we'll use some of these logs here to make a little kind of impromptu kitchen and let's cook some lunch for me and julia out of this wonderful puffball okay so the first thing we're gonna have to do is trim off all of this dirty outside bit here and it's really curious when you cut this mushroom it makes a kind of squeaking sound it's very much like cutting polystyrene foam or something but yeah we're just going to cut away all this nibbled and dirty exterior very carefully just shave it off like this you don't in better specimens than this you probably don't need to do this but typically these things are so big but it's kind of okay to lose a bit of it this way i've eaten it a few times it's not a strongly flavored mushroom and it's got a very spongy soft texture as well so it need it will need a little bit of help in the cooking but i've brought materials today with me specifically to assist with that and it really is just soft mushroom flesh that happens to be solid white mushroom how about that it feels like that art foam that you get and if we were to just fry that as it is it will absorb a lot of fat which i guess if that fat is butter that wouldn't be such a bad thing but we're going to try today to bread it and prepare it a little bit like a piece of fried fish so let's cut one more slice okay right so i'm not going to wash it because you can imagine what would happen this is like foam rubber if i was to try to wash this it would just soak up so much water it would be completely worthless so let's crack on and make a nice batter for this so just brought a little bit of flour there with me and to that we will add one egg and i want to make quite a thick batter because really this is to seal that mushroom and to try to create a coating that will stop the fat from absorbing into the mushroom right we can't just have an unseasoned batter though so i brought my little spice kit with me and we will have in this batter pinch of salt some mixed dried herbs a little bit of smoked paprika and of course black pepper see how that looks when it's mixed together now the thing is with batter is batter does kind of mitigate flavors a little bit so i might add some more seasoning to this batter just to make sure that we haven't really under done the seasoning i think we'll have a bit more of those herbs and that was only the tiniest pinch of salt so we'll put another pinch of salt in there good that's the batter just put that on to keep the flies out okay now i said we're gonna bread these mushrooms in fact what we're going to do is use cheesy tortilla crisps so we'll put some of those in the bag and then just gonna crush those refined crumbs of course this is a bit of extra seasoning as well which is good i've got to crush those up to really fine crumbs i don't want any big pieces of that in there that looks pretty good so back with these mushroom fillets let's just chop them up we'll get a tiny bug there let's just rescue that now we're cooking in the outdoors it is inevitable that some bits of bugs and dirt will get into our food if that worries you don't do it it doesn't worry me so i'm gonna cut these into reasonable size pieces i'm actually going to lose some of that middle there because as you can see that's a little bit woolly there so we'll just cut a piece off the outside there and have that okay that's plenty so mushroom into the batter i thought that might happen it's kind of breaking up but that's not a problem and then into the bag [Music] shake it around that's what it looks like when it comes out which is pretty good so there we go right quick hand wash and then we'll crack on the cooking right now it is a little bit breezy today so i've just bodged up a very quick wind break out of logs we'll get the stove going that should be enough just to stop it from blowing out i've got a bit of vegetable oil and we are going to use butter but i'm not going to start with butter and start with vegetable oil because this will not burn as easily as butter and we'll just wait for that to come up to temperature excuse the noise of planes in the sky not much i can do about that okay we can see that oil starting to go very thin now which means it's nearly at temperature i'm just going to test that with a yeah we've got a little bit of a sizzle there it's good so then we go with our pieces of breaded puffball so we might have to do a little bit of tessellation here we might be all right i think we're just about gonna get gonna squeeze him in we turn that one round now i'm expecting that these will shrink a little as they cook so we're cunning here yeah just about and we're going to try and cook these quite gently because what i don't want to do is just burn the breading before the mushrooms inside are cooked here it's starting to sizzle and actually the smell is quite wonderful most of that aroma is not the mushrooms themselves it's the breading and the seasoning and that's going to be the case with this actually this is not a strongly flavored mushroom so we have to help it along with the coatings and the seasonings okay so these are all that done now and they have shrunk a tiny bit but not actually as much as i expected they might but those are looking nice and the way we can tell they're done is just resting a clean finger against the back of one of the ones i haven't turned and i can feel the heat coming through which means the heat made it made its way all through the mushroom so now we're just going to finish with a few pieces of butter give that a shake around so they all get a fair share now obviously what i've made today is not vegan it is kind of vegetarian but that wasn't what we were aiming for really today anyway all right we're just gonna continue frying that until that butter is absorbed and then we're ready to serve okay those are now completely done so i'm going to turn the stove off whoops off and i'm just going to taste one as it is at the moment so there we go look at that and the texture inside now let's not pretend this is going to be like chicken or anything it's more like i suppose if we had to compare it to something it's gonna be like tofu oh but there's a really nice mushroom flavor there so so the eating experience is like silky mushroomy savory little pieces of something but yes it's not like chicken it's like yeah it's like mushroom flavored tofu so let's get preparing this meal i apologize for the sound of dogs barking in the background i can do nothing about that let's serve these up just a couple of little lettuce leaves and then on that i think we're going to have a little bit of homemade tartar sauce basically just mayonnaise bit of mustard capers and gherkins chopped up okay i think i've probably done this completely upside down i should have done this the other way around and then a nice slice of homegrown tomato in each one well not bad i would say okay well in a minute we're going to find julia and give her some lunch but i'm going to taste one of these myself first so here goes so yeah you might think that the mushroom flavour would get completely lost in there we did put a lot of seasoning in there and there is the cheesy tortilla chips as well and all the other stuff but actually there's yeah this mushroom flavor is quite deep when it's cooked that is a tasty sandwich and you can see the mushrooms actually gone quite silky and soft inside of there but it's really nice she really combines well with the crispy crust and all those other ingredients in there so that was my chicken fried giant puffball sandwich i hope you enjoyed watching that i certainly enjoyed eating it thanks for watching and i hope to see you again soon [Music]

Channel: Atomic Shrimp

Views: 406,394

Keywords: fungi, foraging, mushrooms, cooking, frying, outdoor, orchard, food, eating

Id: kmFfdK2O1KY

Length: 17min 10sec (1030 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2020