Compound Butter is one of the most brilliant ways to keep and store fresh flavors throughout the cold of winter, when the dearth of mushrooms and fresh herbs might otherwise cause one to go insane. Of course, dried and rehydrated mushrooms may be used for this recipe as well, but why not preserve fresh when you can? The concept is simple. Using the matrix of room temp butter, you make a mixture of sorts, and then store it in the freezer in a way that makes it easy to use small amounts at a time. It can be used on steak, vegetables, in dishes, as a finishing butter for sauces, or simply spread on toast for any time.
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I recently made the proposal in a fit of faux outrage that mushrooms are disrespected by being shelved in nearly all cookbooks unceremoniously under "Vegetables." And this isn't just my imagination: from illustrious home science cookbooks such as "On Food and Cooking" by Harold McGee, to "The Food Lab" by J. Kenji Alt-lopez, to the physical locations of mushrooms in grocery stores, our collective bias, perhaps fueled by misunderstanding, have forced mushrooms into the vegetable section.
You often find the missive "mushrooms are not true plants," as if this were enough to then disregard the factual data which show that not only are fungus definitively not plants, they are evolutionarily older than plants, in fact the progenitor of Kingdom Plantae (Fungi are also the evolutionary progenitor of Kingdom Animalia as well). If anything were fair in this world, vegetables would be a footnote in the fungus section of the cookbook. Maybe not, but such is the depths of my outrage in discovering such bias not only throughout the body public, but also in my own intellectual comprehension. The battle to erect a Third Culinary Kingdom just became personal, as well, as I see bias within me melting away. Now wait a minute, you say, there is no "Fungus" section in cookbooks. That is true. Not yet, at least. There is ample evidence to assert that cooking may in fact be the thing that separates us from our more primitive ancestors. In Richard Wrangham's book "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human," the author goes through a number of physiological changes that occurred during an incredibly short period of human evolution... somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 years only. Consider the millions of years as primates, the swift shift that drastically altered our physique in such sweeping changes demands a powerful force of nature be the main inspiration for such changes.
And so, says Wrangham, fire entered the fray. Some of the more obvious physiological changes to occur to our ancestral Australopithecines as they marched forward through time and evolution toward the Homo habilis and eventually to our own genus name, Homo sapiens sapiens, are what we would define as our primary traits: our relatively fur-free bodies, our upright stature, and our distinct lack of subcutaneous (under the skin) fat, and relatively flat stomachs (rather than the distended bellies of our ancestral creatures). These adaptions give rise to our ability to outrun game, having seemingly endless energy to hunt and to move about, and with the right amount of beer, return ourselves to the shape of our ancestors if we so choose.... at least the distended belly! |
Zachary Hunter
Zachary Hunter is a lifelong devotee to flavor, a professionally trained chef who has been obsessed with mushrooms and uncovering the unknown with regards to edible mushroom chemistry and physiology. He is a member of the NAMA's (North American Mycological Association) Culinary Committee. He lives in Oaxaca, Mexico with his wife Kimberly Hunter--known collectively as the "Mushroom Hunters"--where they offer experiential immersions: artisan-maker intensives as Traveling Traders Bazaar and Mushroom adventures as The Fungivore. 2024 will be their sixth season curating adventures together in Mexico. Learn more at TheFungivore.com or TravelingTradersBazaar.com Archives
April 2024
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