Mushroom Gastronomy: The Art of Cooking with Mushrooms

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Product Details
Price
$35.00  $32.55
Publisher
Gibbs Smith
Publish Date
Pages
240
Dimensions
8.11 X 10.16 X 0.94 inches | 2.45 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9781423664970

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About the Author

Krista Towns is the culinary editor of FUNGI Magazine. A successful recipe developer and award-winning competitive cook, she is also the culinary advisor for Circular Farm--a premier mushroom farm located in Jackson, South Carolina, that supplies gourmet mushrooms, fruiting kits, and growing supplies to consumers. Towns holds a Mushroom Foraging Certification for food service in eighteen states and is an active member of the North American Mycological Association and the South Carolina Upstate Mycological Society. When not foraging, cultivating, photographing mushrooms, or developing recipes, Krista and her husband, John, can be found enjoying the country life in Aiken, South Carolina, with her horses and the family's two beloved spaniels.

Reviews
Fungi are the resplendent stars of Krista Towns's cookbook Mushroom Gastronomy, a treatise on an alluring variety of edible and medicinal mushrooms.

Alongside beguiling food photographs and unusual recipes, the book includes exuberant advice on buying and foraging new varieties of fungi and on their ultimate consumption. There are suggestions to eat only small amounts of unfamiliar mushrooms at first--and never to eat most mushrooms raw. There's a primer on cleaning, cooking, and storing mushrooms, with instructions for drying, smoking, and pickling too, and a guide to stocking the kitchen with a small but specific array of tools and pantry ingredients, like mushroom brushes and delicate oils, to bring out the best fungi flavors.

Following this thorough foundation, twenty-five mushroom varieties are examined in nutritional and gastronomic detail, with notes on their best flavor pairings. Button mushrooms, baby portabellas, and portabellas are introduced as part of the same common mushroom species, just at different stages of growth; there are suggestions for cooking these ubiquitous mushrooms in distinctive and delightful new ways as well, as in umami-rich vinaigrettes or pastry-wrapped Mushroom Wellington.

A parade of more exotic mushroom varieties is included, as with the bright orange, alien stalks of cordyceps, the pinescented matsutake, and the lion's mane, a shaggy triffid lookalike and lobster tastealike that Towns downright swoons over. While one could stick with classic mushroom preparations, like simple sautés with butter and aromatics, the book's wide range of recipes involves cocktails, desserts, kimchi, jerky, and medicinal teas too. One could prepare an entirely fungal feast from these creative alternatives, from maple-perfumed Candy Cap Martinis to Chanterelle-Apricot Galette, with plenty of mushroomcentric mains and sides in between.

Elegant in its culinary presentation, Mushroom Gastronomy is a mycophilic delight that inspires broader and more playful kitchen experimentation with edible mushrooms.--Rachel Jagareski "Foreword Reviews"