Dried Morels: The Magic is in the Water

I'm going to share a secret. OK, it's not really a secret, beacuse many of you do know about it. But I know, from talking with people at tasting demos (even at as wonderful a place as Zingerman's) that a great many people do not know about the utterly fantastic things you can do with dried mushrooms.

As wonderful as fresh morels are, dried morels might be even better. I know there is not the thrill of walking in the woods and finding these elusive treasures, but you can only do that for a couple of weeks a year. And I'll tell you what; even when fresh morels are available, I often supercharge my dishes with the incredible flavor that comes from reconstituting dried morels.

First, what are they? Often wild mushrooms, and morels in particular, come up in such abundance, in such remote, hot places, that it is impossible to get them to market before they start deteriorating. What to do? In places like Montana, the Yukon Territory, and Alaska pickers congregate in large numbers, waiting for just the right time, at just the right spot, for the explosion of morels which takes place in even numbered years, with 2 full moons in July, which have seen rainfall on Tuesdays and Thursdays and dry Wednesdays and frost on 18 of the thirty days of April..... Alright, no one really knows which years are going to be bumper years, but hope springs eternal .

At any rate, when the morel harvest is at its peak, pickers converge and pick hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of morels a day at times. In the same town (or mountainside or burn site) mushrooms trading companies send in their buyers with cash in their hands, and large commercial dryers in tow. The morels are purchased, the price based on the size of the harvest and the number of buyers bidding.

They are then dried in large commercial dryers and shipped off to the markets of America and Europe. How many lbs of fresh morels does it take to make a lb of dried morels? Therein lies the difference between a profitable year and a losing year. Depending on the moisture content of the morels, it may take as few as 6 lbs of fresh to make a lb of dried. Bingo. If you've paid, say $5.00/lb for the fresh morels, then you've made a lb of dried morels for $30.00 (in addition to the expense of flying equipment and people into some remote area of Alaska, and the expenses of your buyers, the interest on the money you borrowed to make this gamble, and the energy to heat your mushroom dryer.)

On the other hand, if it takes 10 lbs of fresh to make a lb of dried, then you have $50.00 into your lb of dried morels. Now if everyone else has only $40.00 into theirs, you're still going to get the same price the other guy got for his.... bad news.

Well, I meant to talk about cooking with dried morels, and give you some directions and examples of the things you can do, but that will have to wait for another day...

Time to pack, get some sleep, and travel to San Francisco tomorrow for the Fancy Food Show

More later......