These magnificent small mushrooms are an excellent solution for pasta, risotti and also legumes and vegetables
ingredients for 4 servings (cost about 5 € pp)
- 200 g cannellini beans of medium size
- 1 onion
- 1 garlic clove
- 400 g wild yellow foot mushrooms
- salt
- fresh parsley
- EV Olive oil
- coarse black pepper
I consider wild mushrooms the ABSOLUTE food on earth. Nothing attracts me more than some black trumpets, porcinis or yellow foots.
Yellow foots (or winter chanterelles) are a cheap wild mushroom, they cost about 20-25 E per kilo. Someone would imagine that they are not so tasty as the more expensive ones.
WRONG, as Depeche Mode would say.
Yellow foots are cheap because they need a deep cleaning. Their taste is superb. But as they are tiny and grow among forest herbs, they usually carry a lot of dirtiness and also a lot of pine needles.
We have already learned that we have to select very carefully the beans, which must be “fresh”, that means collected the same year. Old beans are too dry, and they can´t be cooked uniformly, as their old age and very dry situation creates ¨hard points¨ If organic, even better. I use organic Santa Pau beans from Catalonia, but some good organic cannellini are also an excellent choice.
So, the night before, we soak the beans in mineral or filtered water. This procedure reduces drastically the cooking time and it is not necessary if the beans are not too old.
The next day we put the beans in a big pot full of cold water and we bring to boil. After about 5 minutes we are going to see some foam on the surface of the water. With a slotted spoon we start removing the foam till the moment the beans stop producing any more. This foam is that provokes the known gastric problems.
We take the beans out of the dirty water and we clean them under running water. We put the beans in a kitchen net.
We fill a pot with salted, cold, filtered or mineral water and we put inside the net with the beans. We put on fire and when the water starts boiling, we reduce the heat to low and we let the beans simmer till tender. We remove carefully the beans.
We crush an unpeeled garlic clove and we put it in a cold skillet, we add abundant olive oil and we bring to heat. We remove the garlic when gold and we add the chopped onion. We lower the heat, we add a little bit of salt and a little bit of water and we let the onion be subfried for about half an hour or more, till very tender.
By the way, do you know when we start our ¨soffrittos¨ with garlic and when with onion? Well, if we want the garlic to be more intense we first fry it in oil and then we add the onion. On the contrary when we want the garlic to be more discreet we start with the onion and we cook the garlic in it.
At the end we preheat very well a wok, we add just a little bit of oil and when hot, we add the mushrooms. We sauté them for 2 max 3 minutes, shaking the pan or stirring every 20 seconds as we want the mushrooms to be relatively crispy. We salt them at the very last minute.
We add the beans, the garlic and the onion, some trimmed parsley, black pepper and we serve.
