Morel Mushrooms Cooked Perfectly - Forest Food

in today's episode we'll be cooking and eating mushrooms from the woods if you find mushrooms but you can't 100 identify them as edible do not eat them the forest this time of year in the spring it's amazing it's beautiful it's glorious and there's nothing more wondrous than the morel mushroom [Music] morel mushrooms have a long long tradition in my family and right now right now we're in the middle in fact we're at peak morel mushroom season and here they are these things are glorious they're wonderful and my family's been you know picking them hunting them really you don't pick them you hunt uh mushrooms it's funny that uh my wife's family the side of the family that's from this area in the midwest had a long tradition of looking for morel mushrooms and yet my wife's mother's family was from out east they thought they were deadly poison couldn't believe anybody would eat these things my question when i find them today and i want to eat them but we i connect them with the 18th century and i say now wait a minute did they have morel mushrooms in the 18th century did they want to eat them as much as i do well if you dig in the 18th century english cookbooks you will find morel mushrooms and i do believe they're exactly the same kind of morel mushrooms that we have here today the range for morel mushrooms is over most of the north american continent you'll also find them in western europe including great britain even places in china japan and new zealand you'll find morel mushrooms now these english recipes i am not going to use one of the 18th century english recipes that you will usually find morel mushrooms referenced in because they are sacrilegious they're terrible because they put these morel mushrooms in with all sorts of other flavors and and have them as a tiny component inside of a big expensive dish like a fish pie or something else i'm that is terrible you do not want to do that with morel mushrooms so i did a little bit more digging and i i said well i mean truly the only way to cook a morel mushroom is to fry it and you eat it by itself in fact you don't need anything else really you can just make a meal of morel mushrooms if you if you ask me so i went digging for fried mushrooms and yes primitive cookery has the perfect fried mushroom recipe that's what we're going to do today these things are the best don't ruin it by cooking them any other way in the cookbook primitive cookery 1767 it's a great little cookbook to fry mushrooms toss up your mushrooms with a little broth to take away their bitterness then strew over them salt pepper and flour and fry them in butter or hogs lard this is kind of funny it says to fry mushrooms if you're here in indiana and someone says do you want to eat mushrooms they mean morels that's what mushrooms are in indiana any of those other things that grow out in the you know funguses those aren't mushrooms morels are mushrooms when possible we want to eat these mushrooms fresh the same day they are picked these are beautiful fresh some of them picked the last evening and this morning these are ready to go the preparation is very very simple i've already trimmed off most of the dirt if we had a little bit of dirt and usually i try to get the maximum mushroom out of the ground so i'll bring some up with the dirt and very very carefully take off the root part of our mushroom and occasionally they will have little problems with them that we might need to trim off and this one is looking great so we're going to take our mushrooms and we are going to slice them in half so that we can cook them all the way these are hollow and so one of the reasons one of the ways you can tell whether you have a real morel there are false morel mushrooms and they are poisonous if it's hollow that's good if they have any sort of internal section to them you probably have a bad mushroom and you don't want to eat that and you don't want to eat a bad mushroom because they're poison we're going to place these in our beef broth if you don't have beef broth a simple salt water solution is fine for these they'll absorb a little bit of that beef flavor that's going to be great if not salt water is good too some people manage to freeze them ah boy if you if you've got enough at all you really just want to cook them right away and look for any sort of little crud or dirt the worst part is when you come along and you found the stump of a mushroom something's already come along and gotten it probably a deer or something it's just it's just terrible before we get done let's look at the individual type of morels morels are well they come in different varieties strangely enough early on in the season say mid around here mid april you get spike mushrooms and these are morels but they have a very small head on them and they are generally very dark colored they're called spikes because they just have this little tiny pointy top and that's it later on a week or two later the grays start to come out they have a normal mushroom look now and they are generally kind of grayish in color and they're middling size these are usually the peak tasting mushrooms people really love these later on in the season the yellows come out and we're in the yellow season right now they're much larger and they're yellow colored now the question is are these really all just exactly the same mushroom when they've gotten bigger and bigger no no early in the season that style comes out and then they disappear they don't grow into the yellow they they disappear they dry up and then these other ones sort of appear i don't know exactly how it works and morels are kind of magic anyway you got to be careful when you're hunting them you want to be quiet or else they disappear just when you want to find them they're gone you got to wear the right clothes too and have a mushroom stick if you really want to find morels so we've got these wonderful yellows for late season luckily i was able to find just a couple of these from the earlier seasons so these guys are ready to do a little bit of seasoning and then putting a little flour on them and in the go the recipe just has a little bit of pepper on these guys just get a little bit of ground pepper and we've got a little bit of sea salt again what we want on this is to enhance the flavor not to hide the flavor so that's what the salt is for is to bring out the flavor but if we have so much salt that we can taste it we've got too much salt so i'm going to be very judicious with this we can always if we need to add salt in the eating phase but we want just a touch here in the cooking phase now let's dredge them through our flour and i'll just set them on this plate i you know i could dredge them on the flour and toss them right into the pan but i don't want to do that because i i want them all to go into the pan at once so i can watch them cooking now let me tell you i really want to add nutmeg to this but if there is one dish ever that doesn't need nutmeg this one's it okay now it is time to cook our mushrooms and we want to be very very careful as we're doing this mush these mushrooms are not easy to get a hold of so we're going to be using all the best materials possible and in this case i'm not going to be using just any butter and the recipe called said we could use hogs lard no way we're not going to be using hog's lard on this we're going to be using the best butter we'll be using kerry gold butter i definitely recommend using the best possible you want to be very careful with the temperature of our fire and our our cooking vessel one of the the um family traditions on my wife's side of the family is there's a big mushroom feed once a year and the whole family comes together and the kitchen is filled with these electric frying pans we're not going to be using electric frying pan but they use those because they can they can adjust the temperature precisely and we need to do exactly the same thing in this circumstance so i'm going to be very careful we're using our spider skillet so it stays off of the fire and we want to have the most regular heat across our pan we don't want it to get too hot just like that looks good now we can start to put our mushrooms in we don't just toss our mushrooms in and walk away because we do not want them to burn we so don't want these to burn uh so we're gonna watch them the whole time as they cook this could be just a little hotter there we go that's what we want right there we're going to let the pan warm up just a little bit more remember those english recipes i was telling you about the the complicated ones that would be sacrilegious these morels were always mentioned in the same phrase in the same sentence as truffles you can think of them the the same way very very expensive morels are the same way they're precious because they are only available for a couple of weeks a year and there are some years they're not available at all because the weather's just not quite right and they cannot be commercially grown so they are a wonderful precious thing and we're going to be very careful in how we cook them i usually recommend putting these into the pan with the hollow side down first and as they cook you can flatten them because you want to cook them you know consistently over the entire piece so if you start with a hollow then you can flatten them out as they heat up and then when that bottom side is cooked you turn them over and it just takes a little bit after that and then they're done you can take them right out of the pan once they're out of the pan and they're done draining you do not want to let these get too cold they go to the table hot or at least warm right so they started out like that they end up like this there's only one way to eat morel mushrooms as far as i'm concerned and that's with your fingers and they're nice and crispy smelling out of the pan they're incredible there's nothing like them perfect crunch couldn't be better these are perfect they're like the woods bottles concentrated and the butter matters there you can hardly you can't taste any of those uh spices they're just there just to bring it out this is it could not be better these are perfect if you've never had a chance to try morel mushrooms you want to try these i don't know what you're going to need to do go someplace you know trick somebody into serving you morel mushrooms fried like this you've never had anything like it they are tremendous whenever i'm out in the woods especially this time of year and i get to enjoy the fruit of the woods like these mushrooms it makes me think about getting out and doing something in the woods you should check out this video where we build the structure right behind me

Channel: Townsends

Views: 203,828

Rating: 4.9812908 out of 5

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, mushrooms, fried mushrooms, morel mushrooms, morels, mushroom hunting

Id: d-H6z6M2_8U

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021