More on Morel Magic

What a week! I just spent a week in San Francisco at the Fancy Food Show. Earthy Delights was displaying our retail line of dried mushrooms, chiles and spices. We got a great reaction from those who visited us and saw our products.

I also managed to walk the entire floor and look at every booth at the show. 3 days of standing and walking on cement was a challenge to the legs, but we saw lots of interesting new products, learned a lot from the seminars, and came back charged up. I never did find the time to write, and back now for a week, I'm just getting caught up.

More on the new products later. I need to finish writing about the wonderful sauce you can make with dried morels!!!

It is just so easy to create a dish or a sauce which will simply explode with flavor, and enhance any meal -- for yourself or for guests.

What I'll describe here is a simple morel mushroom sauce appropriate for serving over any meat, or over pasta or rice or noodles for vegetarians.

First start out with a few dried morels and a large bowl of warm water. Remember, an ounce of dried morels will reconstitute as 6 to 8 ounces, so you can make a sauce for up to 4 people using as little as one ounce of dried morels.

Soak the dried morels in a large bowl of warm water; use enough water to completely cover the mushrooms. Allow to soak for 30 - 40 minutes. Meanwhile, prepare the rest of your meal -- make a salad, broil your meat (my favorite is maranated flank steak -- recipe to come)

After the dried mushrooms have soaked enough for 30 - 40 minutes, drain the liquid into a bowl and SAVE THE LIQUID!! As I said before, the magic is in the water!!


Depending on the size of the morels, you may want to cut them in half, slice them, or use them whole. Let them drain on a paper towel.

In a large saucepan, over medium low heat, melt 3 tablespoons of butter gently. If you like, you may use 1/2 butter, 1/2 olive oil. When the butter is melted, slowly add in and whisk 3 tablespoons of a good all-purpose flour, and whisk the mixture until it is a smooth consistency.

These portions aren't magic. You may have to add a little butter or oil if the roux is clumped up. On other days, you may have to add a little flour. Let simmer for a few minutes, breaking up any lumps with the whisk.

Then, slowly, slowly, still over medium low heat, add the reserved liquid, one cup for every tablespoon of butter or flour ( in this case 3 cups). Let the sauce heat slowly, until it is an even consistency, then add more liquid. You can speed this process a little by slightly heating the Morel Magic Liquid. The consistency should be that of a good gravy.

Add the reconstituted morels to the liquid and continue to simmer, 10 - 15 minutes. Add salt, pepper or other flavoring to taste. (I often use a nice aged balsamic vinegar)

Serve at tableside over roasted meat, over pasta or rice. I promise, this will be one of the most rich, incredible flavors you have ever tried, and absolutely unlike anything else.

More to come!!

Ed Baker

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......

Welcome to my blog

Welcome to the first posting of my blog "Searching for Wonderful Food." Actually, this is my second posting; my first was on December 5, 2005. I think it is general practice to post more than once a year. I intend to do that from now on.

So who the heck am I and why should you care? First, I am not a "Foodie" or any kind of "expert."
I kind of fell into this gig selling specialty produce and other foods about 16 years ago. My first reaction was that someone couldn't really sell food by mail, and that I'd stay until I found a "real" job. This was in 1990, and the company was called Michigan Marketing Association.

It's now 2007, and the company is called Earthy Delights, and for better or worse I am the owner and president. We've been selling specialty foods to some of America's finest chefs for almost 20 years now. As it turns out, the majority of our sales are of wild mushrooms (see previous post) and truffles. We also sell specialty produce, cheese, fine oils and vinegars, exotic spices, dried fruit and honey, chocolate, gift baskets and much more.

During the time I've been here, I've learned some things about food, and about the food business that I think a few of you may find interesting. In particular, I seem to be in a unique place to let you know about the wild mushroom harvest in the US and around the world. Do you want to know when fresh morels will be available, and where they're coming from? Do you want to know about fresh truffles for the holidays?
When can you expect to see fresh fiddleheads?

I've also had the opportunity to taste thousands of wonderful and unique foods, and I would like to share my finds with anyone interested enough to take a few minutes to read my ramblings. I'll be writing about reconstituting dried mushrooms, attending the Fancy Food Show, going out to visit a cheesemaker in Northern California, or a mushroom harvester in Nova Scotia.

I'll also be cooking with many of these foods, and sharing with you the results (successful and not so successful)so you can experience some of these wonderful flavor too.

Tomorrow I'll let you know how my morel sauce goes tonight!!

Stay tuned

Ed Baker