Matsutaki: How to cook?

It's mushroom season in the GPNW (that's Great Pacific Northwest, Andre, the state of Or. specificly:lol: ) and the matsutaki (pine mushroom) are fruiting abundantly. Does anyone have a way of cooking these delicious shrooms?

R,

You must brush the mushrooms clean and wipe off with a damp paper towel. Soaking in water is not desirable because fresh mushrooms absorb like a sponge.

Saute in half/half olive oil and butter to the desired degree of doneness. Season with salt and pepper. One could find a more complex recipe but this type of delicacy should be prepared simply, imo.

You could serve with meat, rice or toast points made with good bread. Would also be good in risotto and worked into vegetarian recipes.

For others in our community: ONE MUST BE ABLE TO POSITIVELY IDENTIFY WILD MUSHROOMS BEFORE CONSUMING. Help from a knowledgable collector is needed. This is not something you should do from a field guide.

augustine wrote:R,

You must brush the mushrooms clean and wipe off with a damp paper towel. Soaking in water is not desirable because fresh mushrooms absorb like a sponge.

Saute in half/half olive oil and butter to the desired degree of doneness. Season with salt and pepper. One could find a more complex recipe but this type of delicacy should be prepared simply, imo.

You could serve with meat, rice or toast points made with good bread. Would also be good in risotto and worked into vegetarian recipes.

For others in our community: ONE MUST BE ABLE TO POSITIVELY IDENTIFY WILD MUSHROOMS BEFORE CONSUMING. Help from a knowledgable collector is needed. This is not something you should do from a field guide.

Let the season begin! And remember; there are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters...but there are no old, bold, mushroom hunters.

Just curious, are these "matsutake" farm-raised like shitake or are they wild collected? Do they have an English common name? Please excuse my ignorance.

When I lived in Japan I was lucky to live way out in the sticks, in the countryside not far from Nikko. People raised shitake but in the fall we feasted on wild collected feathery maitake and a big red toadstool type called chitake (chi as in blood). It was added to soups and udon broth and turned black, giving a smoky taste. I never saw chitake for sale, but was stunned to see how muck maitake cost in Tokyo markets. Matsutake sounds familiar, but I can't place it... but then it's been almost 30 years!

R

Russell...As Katzin said, the common name is "pine mushrooms."
They are both farm raised and collected from the forest. When I lived in Sonoma County we waited for the first rains after a long dry summer...first came large oyster mushrooms popping out on dead white alder trees standing in sonoma creek, followed by chanterelle hiding under autumn leaves, then matsutake in the conifer forrests. Then porcini...on and on.
There's something mysterioua and lunar about hunting mushrooms. You find yourself deep in the silent woods, intensly focused in hunter-gatherer mode. And sometimes lost.
A google search revealed nothing for chitake. Now I'm curious. 

I have been an avid fungiphile since the days of my youth, chasing morels across the SE Pa. landscape. I am old, but not bold, I know my shrooms. I am a professional picker (I get paid) and certainly concur that you should not eat anything without absolute, positive identification.

I was hoping you'd come through on this Russell, but I understand, shrooms are like trees in that every country has there own names for things. In Japan they are brown, Tricholoma mastutake, and mostly associated with Red Pine. Here in the Northwest we have Tricholoma magnivelare or white matsutake and we find them around Sugar Pine and Ponerosa in mixed forests.

They are highly prized in Japan and I have earned as much as $200US per pound. Demand is down these days and prices are more like $10US a pound, but a fellow can still make a good buck in a day picking. One patch can produce 50lb(and you can spot alot of yamadori while you're out there)LOL  Any excuse to get out in the woods and I'm already packed, let's go!

P.S. I did not know these could be raised commercially, I was under the impression they could only be gathered from the wild.

From experience I agree with the warnings here. I did about a weeks worth of self damage from picking chantrelles earlier this year. I didn't die, but I wanted to! I must have gotten a jack-o-lantern in there. I was the only one that got sick out of 5 of us that ate them. Ouch!

Paul Staments wrote a series of books on cultivation of mushrooms. He covers the specifics for some 100+ different species. He has brought quite a number of edible & medicinal mushrooms into cultivation. His book, "Rhizome Running, or How Mushrooms can Save the World" is a fascinating read, well worth the investment. Hit Amazon and search his name or go to his website http://www.fungiperfecti.com check the titles, Amazon usually carries his titles cheaper than he does.

He, Paul Staments and his company Fungi Perfecti is also my favorite source for mycorhiza spore innoculumn. One of his products is the water soluble spore innoculum, and it contains a greater variety of mycorhizal species than any other brand I have found. Since trees are moderately specific about which species to use as symbionts, I figure the greater the variety the more likely the success.

But for technique, both large scale and small scale for cultivation of edible mushrooms, his 2 books on mushroom cultivation as a set cover it all.