Earlier this week I was throwing together staff meal for a video shoot with Barebones Living. A big bowl of wild rice with chanterelle mushrooms was supposed to be for the crew, but it ended up in the shoot.
The shoot was focused on summer foraging and campfire cooking. I’d planned on making pork chops with serviceberry sauce, as well as my favorite French chanterelle omelet.
Pork chops with serviceberry sauce and wild greens. Image by Jesse Roesler.
As I prepped ingredients for the shoot the night before, I remembered I’d forgotten to make staff meal. Thinking back to my first trip to the barrens with Sam Thayer, I remembered escaping the sun under some hazelnut shrubs to share a big bowl of wild rice with vegetables for lunch.
Image by Andy Berndt.
Wild rice, especially natural wild rice, is great at any temperature. Served cool, warm, or room temp, it makes a great salad as it’s not as heavy as black paddy wild rice. If you’re not familiar with the real deal, there’s a link at the bottom of the post where I go in-depth on the confusing differences between different types of wild rice.
The real deal. Parched wild rice. I usually buy mine from KC’s Best, but there’s lots of suppliers.
I cooked up a big pan of chanterelles and a couple handfuls of summer vegetables, added some rice, seasoned it, let it cool, mixed in a bunch of herbs, and packed it into deli containers.
Cantharellus enelensis (the Newfoundland chanterelle) grows in the jack pine forests.
As I cooked I thought about how it was a nice, one-pan chanterelle recipe that’d also be perfect for the shoot, and more rustic than my omelet than makes a smaller serving. So I scratched the omelet and prepped another batch of rice for the shoot instead.
Some of the best food is cooked in the moment with feel and instinct, instead of by following directions.
How to Make It
There’s a lot of mushrooms in this. It’s a good thing to make when you have a bag of mushrooms cleaned in the fridge already and you couldn’t help but go and pick more anyway.
You cook a little cured meat like bacon (optional), lots of chanterelles or other wild mushrooms, wild rice, a couple stingy handfuls of vegetables that function as a garnish, and plenty of herbs.
It’s all about the wild mushrooms and rice here. A handful of black walnuts is a nice touch if you have some.
For the vegetables, I used a little fennel, carrot and garlic scapes, but these can be whatever you have on hand. I made it a few times throughout the week, switching out fennel for sweet corn, peppers for carrots, etc.
It’s all about the chanterelles here.
Whatever you do, try to keep the amount of vegetables to around 8 oz (not including the scallions) as they’re just a garnish. If you use too many the chanterelles can fade into the background.
Serving variations
If I serve salads like this cold or room temp, I season it more, and I might omit the mushrooms or cut them into smaller pieces. Adding extra oil like Sam’s hickory nut, or some EVOO, along with some fresh lemon juice or vinegar and extra herbs can make it pop more if it’s eaten cool too. Wild rice salads also travel well.
Dill flowers are in season and are the perfect garnish.
Warm Chanterelle Mushroom and Wild Rice Salad
Mushrooms and Vegetables
Wild Rice
Serving
Chanterelles and Vegetables
To serve the dish as a cold or room temperature salad
This content was originally published here.
