Mushrooms for Dessert

On Friday, I shared a recipe for shiitake cookies as part of #shroomify October. Mushrooms for dessert is something I enjoy thinking about because it seems so contradictory. Savory, earthy, woodsy is not usually how I describe my desserts — although isn't cocoa powder an earthy taste? If you make a cheesecake more interesting by incorporating goat cheese, might you say the taste is a little woodsy? Or if you've got a dessert component that's overwhelmingly sweet — like meringue — isn't it best balanced by something salty, and maybe even a little umami?

I couldn’t find too much information about mushroom desserts online, but this mushroom store in Montreal has some dessert recipes. There’s also one by Natasha Pickowicz on Smallhold’s website (I follow her method for candying mushrooms), and a small sample online from a Mendocino cookbook I have, The Wild Mushroom Cookbook.

Many of the recipes I came across emphasize candy cap mushrooms, which can be found in the forests of the Pacific-Northwest and apparently nowhere at all in New York City. Eventually, a generous Twitter friend offered to share some of the dried candy caps her friend foraged on the West Coast, so I got to experiment with them myself. The smell is as powerful as others described — somehow more like maple than maple syrup. I made a rice pudding with almond milk and a little too much cinnamon, which I think overpowered the delicate taste. Next time I get some, I want to try making crème brûlée or cheesecake or those maple cream cookies that I always get when I’m in a Canadian airport (you could put candy cap powder into both the cookie and cream layers). Another thing you could do with them is make a simple syrup and then use it in place of maple syrup.

I could probably write up 10-20 mushroom dessert recipes, but rather than bury you in them, I’ll use this newsletter to describe the main techniques I’d use to get mushrooms into desserts. You can make the adjustments yourself to your favorite recipes or come up with totally new inventions. Please let me know what you make!

Caramelized shiitake bits to throw into anything

This is the technique I use in the shiitake cookies. It creates these sweet, chewy bits that you can think of and use like dried fruit — in cookies, cake, strewn atop chocolate bark or the layers of a cinnamon roll, or sprinkled over ice cream or in your morning oatmeal. I think they’d be incredible mixed with chopped nuts and added to something like a baklava or a crumb cake.

Method: Heat a large cast-iron pan or nonstick pan over medium-low heat with oil and then add the mushroom pieces. Let them sear on the bottom till brown, then move around and keep cooking until all the pieces are soft. Add a pinch of salt and cook off the water released by the mushrooms. Add a couple spoonfuls of sugar, which will quickly dissolve and then stir continuously until all the pieces are lightly browned. The idea is to cook as much water out of them as you can without burning them. Be patient and turn down the heat if necessary. The whole process will take about 10 minutes. Remove to a plate or sheet tray to cool (you can put it in the fridge to speed up the cooling).

Candied

I’ll mostly refer you to Natasha Pickowicz’s method here, but the basic idea is to make a vanilla simple syrup using equal parts water and sugar, then simmer some small mushrooms in it for 1-2 hours, until the syrup is reduced by half. To use the candied mushrooms, you dry them out for several hours or overnight. These are much sweeter than the caramelized bits above. Their main advantage is that the gentle cooking method allows you to keep small mushrooms whole and beautiful, which makes them good for garnishes or decorations, like the way Natasha uses them on chocolate, or my plan to make little trifle “dirt” cups with candied mushrooms growing out of them.

Infused cream

There are so many possibilities once you have a mushroom-infused cream. You can simply whip it up, with or without added sugar. You can use it as the base for a chocolate ganache, pastry cream, or ice cream. You can also infuse a non-dairy cream, like coconut or almond — it probably won’t whip up as well, but still has a lot of uses. You can infuse using dried mushrooms or a mix of fresh and dried, as I describe in the method below. Although just leaving dried mushrooms in cream or milk overnight will infuse a bit, heating the liquid to a gentle simmer will help bring out the flavor more. With my candy caps, I combined them with almond milk, which I brought to a boil then let cool down to room temperature and blended it all together, so that I wouldn’t lose any of the taste. Here’s another method for a shiitake-porcini cream:

Method: Heat a pot over medium-low heat with a little bit of oil and add some sliced shiitake mushrooms and a pinch of salt. Cook for ~10 minutes until most of the water is gone. Add the heavy cream and a small handful of dried porcini mushrooms. Heat just until it comes to a simmer, then take off the heat. Pour the cream with all the mushrooms into a container with a lid and keep in the fridge up to a week. When you’re ready to use, strain out the mushroom solids (you can add them to pasta, eggs, sandwiches…), making sure to squeeze to get out as much liquid as you can.

Free idea: mushroom cannolis! Porcini cream filling and shiitake bits instead of chocolate chips.

Mushroom butter

There are several ways to make a mushroom butter, which you could then use just like regular butter in a cookie or brownie recipe (the consistency would be slightly different, so I’d avoid a fluffy cake recipe). You could make a simple compound butter by mixing minced cooked mushrooms into some room temperature butter and then letting it harden up again in the fridge. Or you could mix powdered mushrooms with melted butter and use it immediately. When I was making mushroom buns for filled bread party the other week, I painted porcini butter onto the dough before sprinkling roasted cremini pieces across it.

Here’s a simple sweet butter recipe, which you could incorporate into another recipe (keep in mind the added sugar) or use on pancakes, oatmeal, or bread.

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup heavy cream or whole milk

• 5 grams dried porcini mushrooms

• 2 tablespoons maple syrup

• 1/4 teaspoon sea salt

• 1 stick butter, room temperature

Method: Put the cream, porcini, maple syrup, and salt into a small saucepan and heat just to boiling. Cover the pot and let cool to room temperature, about 10 minutes. Run an immersion blender through the mixture to break up the pieces of mushroom. Add the butter in chunks and keep blending until you have a fluffy uniform mixture. Spread out on plastic wrap and wrap up into a log, or scoop into a sealable container. Store in the fridge for a week or a couple months in the freezer.

Caramel sauce or chewy caramel candy

Mushroom and caramel taste really really good together. I suppose it’s for the same reason that a salted caramel is so much better than a purely-sweet syrup. I use the infused mushroom cream method above (either with heavy cream or coconut cream), with a heavy handful of dried porcini, to get the flavor into this caramel and then give it a long slow cook for the flavors to develop. (If you want to observe the results of caramelization, try tasting your caramel after 2 minutes and then again after 20 minutes.) I also happen to have a lot of mushroom garum in my pantry, some from the Noma release and some made by my friend Arkadiy, so I’ve been adding it for extra salt and umami. You could use a little miso instead if you want.

Ingredients:

• 55 grams sugar

• 20 grams light corn syrup

• 50 ml water

• 50 grams mushroom cream

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1/2 teaspoon mushroom garum (or miso)

Method: Combine all the ingredients in a small pot and heat slowly over low heat. Maintain a slow simmer, stirring occasionally, at least 20 minutes or until the caramel reaches the desired consistency (it will thicken as it cools, so if you want a caramel sauce, you can stop it when it still seems quite liquidy. If you want a candy, go for something more like a thick honey consistency.) The long slow heat is how the flavor develops, so the longer you cook it (you can always add more water), the more the sweetness will step back, and the acidic and other tastes will come forward.

Slightly less simple syrup

Many of the dessert recipes from my Wild Mushrooms cookbook depend on a simple syrup made from candy cap mushrooms. As I mention above, they’re so reminiscent of maple syrup, you could use the simple syrup just as if it were maple. You could use a different powdered mushroom as well, like porcini or chanterelle, which would be a little funkier but also fun. Then just use the syrup in any recipe that calls for liquid sweeteners (honey, maple syrup, maybe even molasses) or swap it in for sugar but reduce the liquid somewhere else — King Arthur has a good guide about how to substitute liquid sweeteners in baking.

Ingredients

• 1 cup sugar

• 1 cup water

• 1/4 cup (~5 grams) dried candy cap

Method: Soak the candy cap in the water overnight. Blend together, then put in a saucepan and add sugar. Bring to a boil and then simmer for 5 minutes. Strain out the solids if you want.

Using powders

Finally, the easiest way to incorporate some mushrooms into your favorite cake or cookie or brownie recipe is by adding some powdered mushroom. Many medicinal ones, like chaga or lion’s mane, are already sold in powdered form. If you have bigger dried mushrooms (porcini or chanterelles are nice flavors for desserts), you can make them into a powder with a spice grinder or coffee grinder.

For average baking batches (e.g. 2 dozen small cookies, or 1 tray of brownies), you probably need at least 2 tablespoons of a strong mushroom like chaga to get the taste. That amount of a dry ingredient won’t really affect the bake, though you could drop an equal amount of flour if you’re concerned. My favorite combination so far has been the addition of chaga to a buckwheat chocolate cake recipe. I made some mushroom-and-potato vegan cupcakes with this combo and a Japanese sweet potato frosting, pictured above. The earthiness of buckwheat plays so well with the chaga flavor, I think I’ll find a lot of ways to combine them.

What I’m Cooking

Caramelized Shiitake Cookies (v, gf option)

These cookies are chewy, satisfying and somewhere between savory and sweet. I’ve tried them with a handful of chocolate chips in addition to shiitake chips which makes them feel more like normal cookies, so you could start there if you want and then see how mushroomy you feel like taking things.

I’m giving away all my sweet mushroom secrets for free, but you can become a paid subscriber for the full recipes and to support my porcini budget!

Caramelized Shiitake Cookies (v, gf option)