At the end of my recent visit to Bio-Champi I had the opportunity to buy some White Ferula Mushrooms, a type of premium oyster mushroom much prized as a culinary ingredient. They were offered at a very reasonable €10/kg and I jumped at the chance. Here is how I prepared them:
Ingredients:
500g oyster mushrooms, sliced
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 tbsp chopped parsley
1/3 cup cream
Method:
- Heat the oil in a large frying pan on medium-high heat.
- Add the mushrooms, season with salt and pepper, and fry them quite hard for 5 minutes.
- Add garlic, reduce heat and cook for another minute.
- Add the parsley and cream, stir and cook for another minute.
- Serve with grilled meat or on toast.
The White Ferula Mushroom is mild flavoured with a firm texture, not at all like a supermarket button mushroom or an ordinary grey oyster mushroom, but these more readily available species could be substituted. This is a classic mushroom dish, taught to me by the chef at a former workplace.
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8 comments:
I love edible mushrooms of any shape and color. This dish looks and sounds especially yummy!
They are one of those mushrooms that looks great and has good mouthfeel, although the flavour is quite delicate. A very cheffy mushroom rather than for good strong peasant dishes.
Those are NOT ordinary Oyster mushrooms.... they have a specific name [which I can't remember] not just white ferulas.
Jim the Mushroom Man used to sell them on Leeds Market.... he learnt his trade in the Champion caves in Loches....
They are the BeezKneez... sliced across into bits that look like the muscle of a scallop... lightly fried on each cut and servedn up directly on wholegrain toast and drizzled with hazelnut oil!!
Love them!!
Damn, commenting them has made me hungry!! You're as bad as Ken!!
Did you read my post about Bio-Champi? These ARE White Ferula Mushrooms Pleurotus eryngii var nebrodensis. However, there is considerable confusion about nomenclature and taxonomy of certain very closely related and similar Pleurotus spp. These particular mushrooms are also the result of specially selecting strains which present well commercially.
I only know them as Eryngii.... thanks you've reminded me of the name!
I love them!!
Jim sold them simply as Eryngii
I've never heard of them. We did a bit of mushrooming in Andorra, but stopped after one of the local 'experts' died from his mushroom omelet. Now I buy - but will watch for these Grand Frais maybe?
So his mushrooms could equally have been King Oyster P. eryngii var eryngii. Very similar looking, you'd need to be really familiar with them to tell them apart on a market stall.
I'd never heard of them either. I go out with a bunch of retired pharmacists, none of whom have managed to seriously poison themselves, but I restrict myself to the unmistakables on the odd occasion I do eat wild mushrooms. I'm lucky in that I've got access to interesting cultivated mushrooms so don't have to bother with wild to be honest. Grand Frais is probably a good place to keep an eye out. I don't know when Monsieur Zhang is planning to offer them as a culinary product -- probably a couple of years I would guess. But he's not the only one growing them -- just that his are particularly good quality and refined.
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