D6| Saturday/Sunday, March 14 - 15, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
EATING & DRINKING
These days, button mushrooms
don’t get the respect that wild
varieties do. Learn the lost art of
rendering them irresistibleMUCH AS WElike to imagine that
the French all cook with the same
exacting attention to detail as their
country’s finest chefs, most take
shortcuts, just like the rest of us.
Their advantage lies in France’s vast
array of exceptional tinned, jarred,
frozen and readily available prod-
ucts waiting to be whipped up last
minute into something far greater
than the effort expended on it.
This chocolate chestnut Pavlova
relies on one such product,crème de
marrons(chestnut purée), which
comes in pretty tins and also in
tubes that simply beg you to
squeeze a bit right into your mouth.
The well-known Clement Faugier
brand is easily obtained online or in
gourmet shops stateside. The pure
and simple purée of chestnuts is
sweetened with a bit of sugar and
accented with vanilla. Right now, as
we stockpile pantry staples to see us
through the months ahead, this
shelf-stable import promises a wel-
come dose of pleasure.
The Mont Blanc, a classic dessert
involving intricate swirls of chestnut
purée, requires a pastry bag and
some expertise. I prefer to make a
Pavlova—really nothing more than
an oversize meringue with a well in
its center. Into this well, in summer,
go fresh berries and whipped cream.
But in this in-between season, when
winter citrus is no longer at its peak
and spring fruits have yet to ripen,
this pouf of meringue makes an
ideal base for a mound of whipped
chestnut cream. Since chocolate and
chestnut pair like twins, I like to add
cocoa to the meringue before baking
it; just before serving, I’ll dust on
some more. If I have candied chest-
nuts, I’ll scatter them about, too.
The result is something quite
grand and—between you, me and
the French—also remarkably easy.
—Aleksandra CrapanzanoIt looks like the work of a trained pastry chef, but this
impressive confection of meringue, chocolate and chestnut
calls for little skill and unbelievably low effortTED + CHELSEA CAVANAUGH FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, FOOD STYLING BY CAITLIN HAUGHT BROWN, PROP STYLING BY CARLA GONZALEZ-HART
Deliciously Deceptive
Pasta With
Mushroom and
Black Olive
Sauce (Norcia
Style)
In Umbria, Umbricelli
or Pici, a hand-rolled
spaghetti, would be
the traditional accom-
paniment to this
earthy mushroom-ol-
ive sauce, but store-
bought durum-flour
spaghetti and penne
work well. Pair with a
Rosso di Montefalco.
Total Time45 min-
utesServes6-81 pound button
mushrooms,
coarsely chopped
into^1 / 2 -inch pieces
¼ cup extra-virgin
olive oil
Salt and freshly
ground black
pepper
2 cloves garlic,
minced
1 cup oil-cured black
olives, pitted
½ cup chopped Ital-
ian parsley leaves
4 tablespoons
unsalted butter
¼ teaspoon red
pepper flakes
1½ cups heavy cream
1 pound spaghetti,
spaghetti alla
chitarra or penne
Juice of^1 / 2 lemon
1 cup Parmigiano-
Reggiano, gratedKATE SEARS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, FOOD STYLING BY PEARL JONES, PROP STYLING BY SUZIE MYERS1.Bring a large pot
of salted water to a
boil.
2.Heat oil in a 12-
inch heavy sauté pan
over high heat. Add
mushrooms and salt,
and toss to coat with
oil. Continue cooking,
tossing as liquid re-
leases, until mush-
rooms begin to color,
5-10 minutes. Reduce
heat to medium, add
garlic and cook, toss-
ing, 1 minute. Trans-
fer mushrooms to a
food processor along
with olives and pars-
ley. Pulse to a pesto-
like consistency
3.Melt butter in a
large frying pan over
medium heat. Add
mushroom-olive mix-
ture and chile flakes.
Sauté, stirring, until
butter is absorbed
into mushrooms and
mixture starts thick-
ening, about 5 min-
utes. Add cream and
heat through. Season
with salt and pepper.
4.Cook pasta in boil-
ing water until al
dente. Drain and
transfer to a serving
bowl. Toss with
sauce, lemon juice
and two-thirds of the
Parmigiano. Serve on
warm plates with re-
maining cheese to
pass.Marinated Mushrooms
Active Time30 minutes
Total Time3 days (includes
marinating)
Serves8-12 as an appetizer21 / 2 pounds button
mushrooms
2 tablespoons salt(^1) / 3 cup olive oil
3 tablespoons white
wine vinegar
8 garlic cloves, peeled
and crushed
½ yellow onion, grated,
with juice
1.Place mushrooms in a large
pot and cover with cold wa-
ter. Add salt and bring to a
boil, stirring occasionally,
Once pot boils, remove from
heat and strain.
2.In a bowl, mix oil, vinegar,
garlic and onions. Toss mari-
nade with hot mushrooms.
Refrigerate 3-4 days before
serving. Mushrooms will keep
2 weeks in refrigerator.
which causes the mushrooms to steam and
not brown. That’s the basic approach in the
recipe for pasta with mushroom and black-
olive sauce at right. In the recipe for mari-
nated mushrooms, meanwhile, salt in the
marinade extracts water from the buttons
even as the flavors of the oil, vinegar, garlic
and onions soak in. These intensely flavorful
buttons are excellent on a charcuterie board
or tossed in a tender lettuce salad.
Olney’s recipe for Provençal-style but-
tons starts by drawing out moisture
from the mushrooms. Cooking contin-
ues until that moisture is partly evap-
orated, partly reduced and concen-
trated, and sucked back into the
mushrooms. Start with medium-high heat,
be generous with the extra-virgin olive oil and
salt the mushrooms to help extract liquid. As
you cook, you’ll be surprised by how much wa-
ter seeps out. Just keep going, and after a few
minutes, your mushrooms will start to turn
golden, then brown, and even crisp up a tiny
bit. Again, be sure they’re not all piled on top
of each other: They need contact with the sur-
face of the pan.
The ideal moment of doneness: deeply
browned at the edges, still moist inside. That’s
when a button will be the most savory and
succulent—every bit as delicious as a wild
mushroom that sells for five times the price.
W
HATEVER HAPPENEDto
the simple button mush-
room? It used to show up
in cookbooks as part of
showstopping dishes such
as Beef Wellington, the crown jewel of 1960s
dinner parties. Or more simply, but no less
special, sautéed and spooned over a rare
T-bone steak—my mother’s go-to dish for
fancy entertaining in Chapel Hill, N.C., where
Igrewup.
In the 1980s, French nouvelle cuisine
reigned, and chefs started paying attention
to more exotic mushrooms—the button’s sex-
ier wild cousins. Chanterelles, morels and
dried porcini were revered, while the button
mushroom faded from cookbook pages and
restaurant menus. It made only rare appear-
ances, invariably raw—which guarantees
blandness—on a crudité platter, or sliced
into a spinach salad with hot bacon dressing.
Once we’d survived nouvelle cuisine, local-
artisanal was the prevailing aesthetic. Many
chefs became foragers (myself included), and
serving a slightly gnarly-looking mushroom
picked in a secret spot that morning brought
cachet to a dish.
Button mushroom were nowhere in sight
at Genoa, one of the first chef-driven, sea-
sonally focused Italian restaurants in Port-
land, Ore. (now closed), where I worked for
20 years and eventually became the owner.
At Nostrana, the regional-Italian restaurant,
also in Portland, I own and run with my hus-
band, David West, I’ve focused on porcini,
maitakes, morels, chanterelles and other de-
lights that grow in our local forests and
come to us by way of dedicated foragers.
But recently, while thumbing through
Richard Olney’s 1974 cookbook “Sim-
ple French Food,” I remembered my
mother’s technique for sautéing the
mushrooms she piled on the T-bone.
She learned to cook them from Olney’s
book and later taught me. “This is the
easiest and best method of treating any
number of mushrooms whose flavors tend to
be a bit flat,” Olney writes. And OK, yeah, the
button mushroom can taste pretty flat—un-
less you know how to handle it right.
The trick to making button mushrooms as
flavorful as their more exotic cousins is to
get rid of their excess moisture, thereby con-
centrating the intensely earthy umami fla-
vors hidden within.
A typical button mushroom is about 90%
water; the goal is to let the liquid cook off,
which you’ll accomplish by using pretty high
heat and, importantly, not crowding the pan,
BYCATHYWHIMS
Chocolate Chestnut
Pavlova
Total Time2 hours (includes
baking and cooling)
Serves 6
A fun alternative serving option:
Turn this elegant Pavlova into
an unruly Eton Mess. Break up
the meringue once it’s at room
temperature. In bowls, mix me-
ringue pieces, chestnut cream,
candied chestnuts and a dusting
of cocoa. A drizzle of chocolate
sauce wouldn’t be amiss.
6 egg whites
11 / 3 cups sugar
3 tablespoons cocoa
1 teaspoon red, white or
balsamic vinegar
1 pint heavy cream
1 pound chestnut purée
12 candied chestnuts
1 teaspoon cocoa, to dust
1.Preheat the oven to 275 de-
grees and line a baking sheet
with parchment paper.
2.Beat egg whites to soft peaks.
Beat in sugar a little at a time
until meringue is stiff and shiny.
Beat in vinegar. Fold in cocoa un-
til only a few streaks remain.
3.Gently tip bowl and let me-
ringue mound on parchment.
Use an offset spatula or silicon
scraper to form a 9-inch circle
with a raised rim around the
edge. Bake for 1 hour. Turn oven
off, open door and let meringue
cool to room temperature.
4.Before serving, whip cream.
Add 1 cup whipped cream to pu-
rée, then fold mixture into re-
maining whipped cream. Gently
cover meringue with chestnut
cream. Top with candied chest-
nuts and a fine dusting of cocoa.
SPECIAL SAUCEThe
secret to this pasta’s deeply
savory flavor? Button
mushrooms, cooked the
way they should be.
Buried
Treasure