专家觅食者的蘑菇狩猎（和烹饪）课

卡西德·达布尼（Cassidee Dabney）was, in her own words, “geeking out.” Dabney, who runs the kitchen at The Barn, the haute dining room at Blackberry Farm, was far away from the idyllic resort where she works in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. She was spending a late March weekend in Carmel, California, cooking at GourmetFest, a four-day party thrown by the Relais & Châteaux hotel group, of which Blackberry Farm is a member. At the moment, she was standing in the receiving hall of The Hacienda, the private restaurant at Santa Lucia Preserve, a community of homes tucked into the woods on 20,000 ecologically conserved acres on California’s Central Coast. Dabney’s newfound friends, members of the Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz and assorted hangers-on, had just emerged from those woods with some coveted finds:蘑菇。

厨师是嫉妒。她瞪大了眼睛的self-named “ministers” of the Fungus Federation showed off their haul. “I wanted to go out with you this morning, but I guess it’s for the best because we had to prep lunch,” she told me. But she was itching to explore California’s edible landscape. “As soon as my team got here we were like, ‘Look at all that fennel growing everywhere! And miner’s lettuce, and it’s huge here! And then there’s chickweed and nasturtium justeverywhere和芥末生长野生和海湾。我们只是在挑选所有东西。”

Dabney, 38岁,生于觅食。她的父亲是一个wildlife biologist who worked for the U.S. Forest Service. The family moved a lot—the Ozarks, Georgia, Tennesse, Virginia, Colorado, Alaska—but only to rural places. “We were always out finding edible things,” she said. “I had to go hunting with my dad. We grew a lot of our own food. He was adamant, and my mom too, that we knew where all of our food came from and what it takes to get food on the plate.”

At Blackberry Farm, where she started as sous chef in 2010 and moved up the ranks to executive chef five years later, Dabney has turned the lifestyle of her upbringing into an art form. “Most of our products are cooked based on what they’re bringing to the table, so recipes for us are super hard. It’s all about technique and cooking with the ingredient.”

With 4,200 acres on which to hunt for wild edibles, choosing those ingredients is always an adventure. “All of our sous chefs are huge into foraging,” she said. They score ramps and chickweed, green blueberries and nasturtium buds for making capers, and best of all, black truffles and mushrooms: morels, chanterelles, boletes, hedgehog mushrooms with their fringelike gills, brain-shaped cauliflower mushrooms.

As she’s done all her life, Dabney tracks her wild mushrooms by the intricacies of seasons. “Morels should just be popping up right now in Tennessee,” she said. “And if I’m seeing these giant centipedes that are big and fat, black and gold, and the May apples just kicking the bucket, then I’m gonna find chanterelles.”

Fungi were the focus of the meal that Dabney, along with The Hacienda’s Jerry Regester and chef Fiorenzo Barbieri of Florida’s Royal Blues Hotel, was cooking for us that afternoon. She reached down to a foyer table the Fungus Federation had covered in newsprint and grabbed a soil-encrusted, rust-colored mushroom, which was the size of this tall chef’s forearm. It was a California GoldenChanterelle- 每块高达2磅，是世界上同类产品中最大的一件 - 它使Dabney有点竞争。

“我们也很大，除了它们有点滴落，外面有一点蕾丝。他们不是这个肮脏的。只是下雨了吗？”

加利福尼亚黄金人坐在泥土中。他们被昵称为“泥母鸡”。但是，当然，下雨了。经过近六年的干旱，加利福尼亚现在湿了。卡梅尔（Carmel）所在的蒙特雷县（Monterey County）的降水量比12月以来的平均水平高400％。真菌联合会的菲尔·卡彭特（Phil Carpenter）说，这对蘑菇有好处。

“我坚信，菌丝体实际上可以坐在那里，保留自己的能量并生存，然后当条件正确时，他们开始生产蘑菇。我们看到了今年。”他说。

木匠像夏尔巴人一样牢固地牢牢地踩到地面。那天早上，他毫无疑问地沿着毒橡树覆盖的巨大斜坡散发出蘑菇，因为我们其他人在他身后爬上了蘑菇。我们发现的大部分内容都不值得厨师：土耳其尾巴，一种是免疫系统助推器的架子蘑菇；Knobby，Carpenter说的黑色碳球，就像吃木炭一样；一个木质，头顶的蘑菇被昵称为“艺术家的海螺”，因为人们将其用作画布。

The spirits of our group of mycologists-for-the-day had started to flag. Then a mustachioed mushroomer emerged from the woods carrying a wicker basket brimming with bright orange chanterelles. The group ran up the hillside, whooping, and ended up with a bonanza.

They were the last of the season’s mushrooms. Chanterelles grow slowly, so it was still possible to find them, but peak foraging in Central California occurs November to January, when the Fungus Federation closes the season with a festival at which they display some 300 varieties. The chanterelles we ate when we sat down to our lunch had been picked by Hacienda chef Jerry Regester the day before; he had the arms covered in poison oak to prove it. On a bed of belugalentils雷格斯特（Regester）在大蒜 - leekvelouté中被刺穿，披上了他的炒chanterelles和巧妙的“ boudin”，其中包括大蒜，牛肝菌，干chanterelles，奶油和鸡蛋。他说：“结果真是太棒了，”他是对的。

For her dish—smoked duck breast with golden beets that had been oven-steamed and twice-seared so that their flavors concentrated deliciously and they came out dense and sticky—Dabney brought a slew of wild edibles to the plate: a drizzle of spruce and hemlock bud syrup; a tangle chickweed pulled from the lawn; shavings of Tennessee black truffle; and a gorgeous purée of roasted creminis and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms finished with sherry vinegar and black truffle oil. “You have the richness of the vinaigrette purée and then the sticky sweet of the syrup and the earthiness of the mushrooms.” The chef clicked her tongue. “It’s really all you need.”

的确。该小组欢呼雀跃，并用他们的真菌篮子进行了训练。然后，达布尼和我一起坐下来，向我教育如何准备，做饭甚至培养蘑菇。

1. Wait to salt.“When you’re sauteeing,” says Dabney, “salt leaches out the water, and you end up steaming your mushrooms in the pan. You’re not going to get any color, and you’re not going to layer in flavors.” Instead, sautée mushrooms in oil, “get some nice color on them,” and then add salt.

2. Use vinegar.Add a splash of sherry or white balsamic vinegar to the sauté oil. “Mushrooms are kind of ‘fatty,’” says Dabney. “They have this richness to them.” The acidic vinegar balances out the fungi’s earthy richness.

3.做蘑菇液。达布尼说，一旦将盐加入炒蘑菇中，“您可以观看液体用尽的液体。”蘑菇的天然水分“自身盘子”。在这种液体中加入一点黄油，并用它涂上蘑菇。

4.洗并干燥。许多专家说不要淋湿蘑菇。相反，将污垢刷掉。达布尼不同意。她说：“您将想要干净的蘑菇。”尤其是在觅食时。“我把它们放入一大锅水中，多次搅拌它们，然后将它们拉出。我也许还有两次，直到水清澈。”但是湿的真菌不能正确炒。因此，达布尼（Dabney）将她的冲洗蘑菇放在冰箱的架子上过夜，在那里干燥，凉爽的空气吸收了水分。

5. Sample them raw.达布尼说：“在烹饪之前，您必须品尝它们，以找出蘑菇需要什么。”深层烤或炒可能会带来苦味，因此，像国王小号这样的蘑菇自然需要炖或煮熟的味道。

6.对摩尔犬保持温和。Dabney prizes morels with their honeycombed heads. But they require a delicate hand. “I don’t like to get too much texture on them because they can get tough,” she says. “I like my morels to be a little bit more supple, so I cook them a little bit less.”

7. Use it all.无需扔掉蘑菇的任何部分。达布尼说：“我们有蘑菇装饰箱。”“我们从那些股票，康斯康星和凝胶中赚取股票。”她将脱水的装饰磨碎成粉末，以折叠成面团，然后抽蘑菇茎并将其浸入橄榄油中。她说：“你把它放在东西上，人们认为他们正在吃烧烤。”“这一切都使一切变得更加重要。”

8. Cage and grill ’em.“At home, I do a lot of grilling because I don’t like to do dishes,” says Dabney. “I have a grill basket. I just toss my mushrooms in a little bit of oil and salt, and grill them off, flipping them around once in awhile inside the basket. It’s so easy.”

9.成长。Dabney, who’s been known to hand out mushroom growing kits to staff at Christmastime, cultivates shitake using pre-innoculated logs available online. All they require is some shade and water. “The logs just went off this year. We got tons,” says Dabney, who likes to roast the shitake in hazelnut cream, a touch sweetened vinegar, and garden herbs. She also grows oyster mushrooms by taking the boxes in which her supplier delivers them and scattering them in the woods, where leftover spores in the cartons sprout into full-sized fungi.