mushroom cacciatore

It’s mushroom hunting season.

If you are brave enough to head out into the wilderness in search of the fungi make sure you wear your hunting mushroom cap and take along your pepper spray… mushrooms taste better with pepper. Just be warned the perils are great if you decide to face the spores outdoors. There are plenty of poisonous mushrooms just waiting for an unsuspecting human to come along to send on a psychedelic journey to the afterlife.

Unless you know your way around the mushroom kingdom, it might be best to leave the Big Game mushrooms to the expert hunters. 

But that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy mushrooms cooked in the hunter’s style. Mushroom Cacciatore (Italian for hunter’s style) is a great way to prepare a pack of portobellos as a main course.

INGREDIENTS

4 portobello mushrooms, stems removed

cooking oil

6 cloves of garlic

1 cup of robust red wine

3 cups of tomato puree

1 cup grated gruyere

1 cup bread crumbs

salt and loads of fresh cracked pepper

PROCEDURE

Preheat the oven to broil.

Get a great big frying pan (all metal, so it can go in the oven) on the stove over medium high heat. Let the pan get hot for 5 minutes. Pour in enough vegetable oil to grease the pan and immediately place the mushrooms in with the gills facing down. Toss in the garlic cloves all willy nilly.

Cook the shrooms for 5 minutes until they get nicely crispy brown around the edges. Flip the mushrooms over, season liberally with salt and pepper. Add the white wine and cook away the boozey smell. Add the tomato sauce around the mushrooms and season again with salt and pepper. Bring the whole mess to a boil.

Top with gruyere, bread crumbs and a nice drizzle of olive oil.

Pop it in the oven until they are golden brown and crispy on top.

Serve hot with some mashed rutabaga and “hot-under-the-collard” greens.

Further reading…

Jamie Oliver Magazine is looking fantastic! I haven’t missed an issue yet and I’m especially thrilled with the offering of the illustrated Make Me in the back of the mag. It is the illustrated recipe page with outstanding illustrations by the young and talented French illustrator Emma Tissier. I just discovered she has a tonne of books available on Amazon (french). 

Incidentally, when the magazine first came out with the first illustrated backpage by Jose Reis de Matos (awesome illustrator from Pork and Sons and French Feasts), I made every effort to become one of the contributors to that page. After some back and forth with the art director I sent in a hopeful submission for an illustrated variation for Mushroom Cacciatore… but to no avail. Emma was too well established and she continues to improve with marvellous contributions to the magazine every issue. 

For the sake of interest, here is my original contribution to the magazine… it’s not quite as timely as it was a couple months ago, but part of me was holding out for the chance to get into the mag. Well done Emma, I love your stuff!