77 Miles Foraging🔗

How big a fan I am of Far West Fungi? Well, I rode 77 miles to bring home some of their mushrooms.

The story starts from their most recent newsletter. Scanning through "...new menu items at the Santa Cruz Far West Fungi Cafe". Wait, they have a cafe in Santa Cruz? Still no words from the farm tour. Not bad to get a sneak peak from the cafe. The route to Santa Cruz is mostly through foresty redwoods, scenic and shady, ideal for summer. So why not make it a mushroom foraging ride? Check out the cafe menu (mushroom guys know how to cook their mushrooms), get some varieties (more options there as it's closer to their Monterey farm), and enjoy a day out riding in the redwood forest. There starts the long but rewarding foraging journey.

Some words on the cafe. It's super cool. Nice mushroom themed artwork on the wall. Bright and clean window display. Inside sits a complete selection of what they have for the season. Not sure if it's the good lighting or just delivered from the farm, the mushrooms at the cafe counter look extra fresh and appealing.

On the other side of the shop has a wooden bench for dine-in if ordering from the cafe menu. We had Vegetarian Mushroom Muffaletta Sandwich and Porcini Arancini. Both are delightfully delicious. Muffaletta is generously layered with different kinds of meaty mushrooms with pickled vegetables and cheese slices, just like the Italian cold sandwich. It's as satisfying as the meaty version yet refreshing thanks to the lightness of mushrooms. Arancini is super duper flavorful. With tomato and mushroom double unami bomb, what's more to say.

As for the foraging part, we got three varieties: chanterelle, wood ear, and black pearl tree oyster.

chanterelle	woodear

black pearl tree oyster	melody

To know them better, here are some mushroomy jargons on the Series Eats

• Chanterelle

These vase-shaped fungi are sweet-smelling, fruity, nutty, and a little peppery. They're best served in dishes with relatively mild ingredients that let their complexity come through—think wild mushroom soup, pasta, or chicken.

• Wood ear

Wood ears, with their crunchy, almost cartilaginous texture, are popular in Chinese cooking for stir-fries or hot and sour soup. They also make a great addition to everything from pan-fried dumplings to clay pot rice.

• Black pearl tree oyster

For a meatier flavor, these novel fungi can be used in many of the same recipes for which you would use cremini and portobello mushrooms—sautéed, grilled for a savory summer supper, battered and fried, or added to a creamy soup for a hearty winter comfort food.

Got some pro tips from the shop guy. Kept a mental note like a junior field detective vigorously writing after spotting a key clue during an interview.

"Chanterelle goes really well with cream and egg, kinda creamy custardy sauce..." "Black pearl has the same meaty umami flavor as all the other oyster, just texture wise is extra firm, having more of a bite to it..."

Upon walking out of the door contemplating the bonus clues, A casually says "Chanterelle sounds like a Carbonara to me, creamy and eggy". Normally I'd give A's ham-and-cheese palate acumen a pat on the shoulder. But this time I gotta say his first instinct is brilliant. As you will see below, it becomes a legendary dish Chanterell Carbonara.

Calling from hungry tummy from hardworking foraging and curious palate wanting to try them all, it's mushroom melody humming the entire ride home in anticipation for Mushroom Melody Pizza for dinner.

Mushroom Melody Pizza🔗

In my opinion, the best way to taste mushroom has gotta be a pizza with the simplest cream-based sauce. It's like a blank canvas that lets their original flavor stand out. The pizza also allows you to taste them side by side so as to distinguish the subtle differences among them. This pizza is like a mushroom gallery, white minimalist stage, showcasing the recent acquisitions. For cream-based sauce, I just used sour cream loosen up with some milk and seasoned with salt and pepper. After placing the mushrooms, I drizzle them with olive oil. All three mushrooms have their appearances, arranged in an interlacing way.

For taste testing, it's undoubtedly very tasty, not just from a hungry tummy, but the gorgeous shroomy essence. My impressions are:

• Chanterelle is very mild, hard to pick up its fruity nutty notes from the generous mozzarella wrapped around
• Wood ear's unique jelly-like crunch adds nice textural contrast. Flavor wise is also mild.
• Black pearl tree oyster is the most umami among the three. Texture wise is medium firm, got a nice bite to it.

Overall, the mushroom flavor is not as highlighted as I'd thought. It might be because they themselves are not salted, just cooked under a boiler. Also, the cheese around them might shield some of the flavor too.

Chanterell Carbonara🔗

I have been practicing Carbonara for a while and getting pretty consistent in nailing this holy grail of Italian pasta dishes. The egg based sauce is what makes all the difference in terms of techniques as compared to other sauces like tomato or pesto based. The tricky part is to get a stable emulsion with egg. You want the cheese in the melting zone but not to scramble the egg while incorporating fat in that narrow temperature window by vigorous whisking. There are quite some good tutorials on the internet where I learned the theory and technique. In fact, there is an interesting series on the whole topic of dried pasta, which is how I got into this in the first place.

Up to now, I'm quite satisfied with my touch on seasoning and control of viscosity of the sauce. A quick walkthrough of original Carbonara sauce (refer to the references below for a complete guide). It starts with egg and Parmigiano Reggiano whisked together and gently heated up using a double boiler method until the mixture just starts thickening. At which point pull sauce bowl off heat and immediately put out maximal elbow grease to whisk vigorously, eliminating any curdled egg, while slowly drizzle in bacon fat to create emulsion, a.k.a water oil bond by protein without separation. Now if swapping bacon with chanterell, it leaves a blank in the role of bacon fat for sauce construction. A natural replacement is butter fat. As it has similar "Homer 'mmmm' worthy" enticing flavor. Imagine "mmm...baconnn", and then "mmm...butterrr". Check.

The process is exactly the same as normal Carbonara other than using melted butter instead of saved bacon fat when building the sauce. As for chanterell, just sauté in olive oil and lightly seasoned with salt and pepper.

The final dish is stunning. It's the beauty of simplicity executed to perfection. For a dish with so few ingredients (egg, parm, butter, chanterell), everything is under magnifying glass. It's all about getting it just right. Thanks to the just-right carbonara sauce, we finally taste the true flavor of chanterell. It's very mellow yet super complex, like a good mystery story worth pondering on. It's got a tinge of sweetness and tad of woodiness. It's tender and supple yet. Most amazingly its own flavor profile blends so well with carbonara sauce that they are two in one like symbiosis. Even the color scheme says they are a matching set, dark yellow on mellow yellow, hashtag matching color!

The sauce viscosity is perfect. My criteria for that is simple. By the time you finish the plate, there should be just a light trace of sauce left. It means it's not too much that leaves a pool of unabsorbed nor too little that pasta dries out at the end. It's just enough that every strand of pasta is generously coated. Another term I coined to describe good sauce coverage is the lip balm effect. Every mouthful of bite should leave your lips lubricated with sauce like lip balm. It's a satisfying tongue windshield wipe to collect sauce left on the lips.

I'm not gonna be self effacing here. If you ask me how I think of this dish, I'd say I wouldn't swap this Carbonara with any other versions. If you ask A, he said this is the best Carbonara I've made, even better than the bacon version, which has appeared in an earlier prefix and it's pretty awesome.

I'm still bisecting why it's extra good. Maybe it's butter fat that is easier to emulsify. Maybe it's the extraordinary chanterell butter flavor combo. I will do more experiments on butter carbonara sauce. The useful takeaway message is you can make mouth-coating carbonara with butter. It's almost always in the fridge and convenient to use. Pair with any sautéed veggie (mushroom will be ideal). You can have Carbonara as good as the bacon version if not better at a moment's notice.

To my beloved readers, if you also live in the Bay Area and know of good Italian restaurants serving Carbonara. Please shoot me an Email of your recommendations. I've been on the search for a while but nothing stands out. In fact, Carbonara is rarely found on the menu. Just to make sure I'm not self-aggrandizing my learn-from-internet Carbonara skills. I'd be really interested to try out the top-tier restaurant version.

Carbonara Reference🔗

• NOT ANOTHER COOKING SHOW
• Ethan Chlebowski
• Alex