Duck Sells

I am going to post the recipe portion of this morning's trip, and then work on the actual trip report later, because DAMN, it was a doozie. There's a lot. A LOT. It will be hours of figuring out, editing together the narratives and linking up what I want to say, and I have things that need doing around the house. But I want to get the duxelles recipe up on the page, because it was FREAKING DELICIOUS, and I want to share it with some friends muy pronto. 

The basics: 

100 grams wet cubes. I used Albino Stargazers from Nichy Myco's Market. 

150 grams button mushrooms. This could easily be oysters or shiitakes, but there were button mushrooms in the crisper. I wanted the bulk, and the flavor. 

Shallots. I used a big one that was really two stuck together. So much of this, is just "or as much as you feel like." Shallot is better than regular onion because it has a finer grain, and a more savory flavor.

2 cloves garlic

2 tablespoons or so of butter

Whole cream, probably three tablespoons or so, but it was honestly just a glug from the carton. I thought about putting it in a tiny pitcher, but that just seemed pointlessly twee. I feel like my ingredients still life looks pissy enough as it is. 

salt and pepper

fresh thyme

My plan from start was to have something that I could portion down to be a manageable dose per puck; I wasn't sure how much of the paste I was going to end up with, but it worked out just right. I started with 100 grams of cubes because I knew it would be easy to keep up with that math.

I chopped the button mushrooms until I had a pile that I liked the look of and then weighed them, and then chopped one more to get a round number. I'm not fussy about weights aside from the cubes, but I wanted something I could repeat and be able to predict both potency and portion size. I used a bunch of side pins from a second flush; they are BUTT UGLY,  and they don't dry up pretty, but once they were chopped, they were perfectly fine. 

I've read reasoned arguments on both sides about whether mushrooms for duxelles should be knife-cut or put through a food processor. I used the food processor. I did, however, hand-cut the shallots, because they can become a mushy mess  with giant random chunks if you process them and they don't hit the blades JUST right. And they don't take all that long to fine dice with a knife. 

The diced Albino Stargazers looked like a bowl of chopped blue suede leather. It was so beautiful. I kept poking it with the spoon and my fingers, turning it over; you don't realize until you get a bowl of really BLUE food, how little truly blue food there is. We have lots of purple vegetables and fruits, but actual BLUE is rare. 

The whole cooking process runs fairly fast; I didn't put a timer on it, but under twenty minutes from the time I melted the butter to the time I was pulling it off the heat. This is definitely one where mise en place is helpful - having everything pre-chopped and ready to toss in the pan is essential, because there's no time to screw with the knife when you're working over the hot flame. 

Melt the butter over moderately high heat; add the diced shallots. Sautee until translucent and fragrant. The mushrooms shift from blue to brown quite quickly; the oxidation reaction that makes the psilocybin bruise blue must be interrupted or altered by the cooking process. I can vouch for the fact that this does NOT mean it's weak. I love the way that fresh mushrooms provide so much more visual intensity than dried; and this stuff DEFINITELY packs a punch. I did a lot of memory-cleaning work with this, and I was RIGHT THERE with a lot of it - I'll go into that in greater detail with the actual trip report, but the visual support was STUNNING.  

Add the garlic and all the mushrooms. Cook until the mushrooms release their water, and then the water evaporates, and they start to stick together and act kind of clumpy. Add the salt, the pepper, and the thyme; taste VERY CAREFULLY for seasoning, or you will get fucked up while you're cooking, adjust as needed, then add enough cream to make it pull up together, remove from heat. 

I weighed it again after it cooled slightly; weight after cooking was 217 grams. The weight is really just a side note - the main issue, is getting a managed apportionment of the recipe, so that I can do math to derive how much of the 100g I'm putting per portion. But it was useful to note how much was lost in evaporation.

I didn't weigh the shallots and the cream, but 100 grams of cubes plus 150 grams of button mushrooms plus probably 100 grams of shallots cooked down to be 217 grams of paste. The whole point of this recipe is "make the water go away." If you're using it for Beef Wellington, which is where most people know Duxelles from, water in the paste will make your puff pastry soggy, and then you will cry, because that magnificent bastard of a dish took HOURS. 

I put the paste into a quart Ziplok bag, snipped a corner off, and piped it to divide. I split into twenty cells of the mold, adjusting the fine tuning with a tea spoon, so that each piece has approximately five grams of active wet mushrooms, approximately equivalent to half a gram of mushroom dried. Please note... this is cooking, I'm not going to be weighing each one. Even if I did, there's some inherent inconsistency in the nature of the paste. You have to go with the flow a bit. 

One little puck is a large microdose; two is a recreational dose; four to five is a therapeutic dose. I took five. I had one just popped into my mouth and chewed to see how it tastes by itself. Unsurprisingly, it's very mushroom-forward, with a strong umami flavor, plenty of savory notes from the onion and the thyme and garlic. The bitter note of the psilocybin which is so prevalent in dried mushrooms is entirely absent. This would be lovely in a ravioli, folded into an omelet, tossed with bowtie pasta. I had my remaining four pieces on toast. I chased it with fifteen grams of THC in the form of a taffy. I am coming to particularly enjoy this partnership; the THC makes me feel warm and fuzzy and emotionally open, while the psilocybin lets me get in there and do the hard work. It's kind of like getting gas at the dentist before they go in with the needle, so that by the time the drill comes you're ready. 

My plan on preservation is to freeze these two pucks to a small vacuum bag, so that each bag will be approximately a gram's worth (dried) and that way I can manage dosage recommendation as far as how much to put in a dish. 

The individual portions aren't all that lovely - it looks like somebody tried to make Reese's Cups out of finely ground sausage. The ones that come out of the freezer will certainly look prettier and hold their shape better, and I'll update later with pictures of them popped out of the mold in a pile, and then bagged. But I wanted this to show how they looked fresh. I had put them in the freezer just long enough to get the cooking heat off them and be able to get them out of the mold, but they were still warm enough to spread readily, and perfect for eating. 

On toast, it's absolutely delightful. For a trippy food to take to a party, I think I might top them with some thin slivers of sweet red or orange bell pepper and maybe parsley leaves or some edible carnation petals; they need some visual relief as much as they need a crisp bright flavor contrast. Duxelles suffers from the same image issue that pate does - tastes delicious; looks like somebody's eaten it already. I don't want to make them so delicious that people fail to realize that they'll set you on your ass, however. Explicit printed warning on a sealed container is definitely in the plan. I'm thinking a chart showing doses. 

Just a note - this is gluten-free bread, which is quite small; if you get the impression that this looks like a massive sandwich, think again. If I were to use regular bread, these would be more like the size of quarter-slice toast points. My bread loaf is about three and a half inches across. I should held one in my hand or something more clearly to scale on the plate, because the knife isn't helping enough. 

Update after freezing: They're still not the prettiest things... I think I could pat the surface and make them look a little more appetizing, and possibly tapping the mold might reduce air bubbles. Everything's a learning process right now. But they definitely turned out just fine from the mold, they didn't crumble or flake. 

In my hand, you can definitely see the scale a lot better. These are not big bites. Five of them was not a chore to eat, and would not be overwhelming in a dish of pasta. If they were made into something like ravioli, a plate with five little dumplings would be an elegant and brain-bending meal. 




And here's the vacuum-packed picture. The thing I learned about THIS part for next time - I should turn them out of the mold, and then put them back in the freezer on the plate while I do all the labeling and setup on the baggies, and then pull them out and bag them and freeze them all at once. They got a little soft and some of the mushroom bits flaked off the top edges while I was working, but the impact won't be noticeable to anyone who's not looking with a critical eye for detail. There are a few dots of mushroom stuck to the inside of some of the baggies, where there ideally shouldn't be
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