Wine Pairing Story (16)

A visual hint as I try the wine as apéritif...December mushroom story
December is there and with it winter, weekends in the Loire are being spaced although this is a beautiful season too : the light is rare but often beautiful. One thing I didn't expect to be still doing at this time of the year is going to the mushrooms in the wild. Usually at this stage of the season most mushrooms have badly suffered from several harsh frost bites, the early morning being usually very cold as early as november in the region. But while mushrooms were very rare in the usual high season of september because of the extreme drought of the the upper soil, they flourished back during the late autumn thanks to mild temperatures and regular rain. And that's how almost in mid december you end up filling your bag not only with wood hedgehogs (Pieds de Mouton in French) also known under the scientific name of Hydnum Repandum, but with Boletus (Cèpe in French) which have usually rotten long time ago at this time of the year.

The Boletus and the miradorAs this scene remind us, the woods are regularly turned into a war zone when a hunting party takes over large swaths of forested land. Usually it is clearly cordonned off with signs and red-and-white tape. It is always strange to fall upon such a mirador in the middle of the woods, but there are quite a lot of them and they are used to allow shooting while limiting the risk of stray bullets hitting other hunters a kilometer away (thanks to a more vertical shooting angle).
This particular weekend where I ventured twice into the woods, I lost myself once and as I was walking on a muddy forest road in what happened to be the wrong direction I saw a Mercedes all-terrain vehicule slowly coming my way along the slippery path. The driver, who was very kind, told me that there was precisely a hunting operation taking place where I was wrongfully heading to. He explained me which forest lane I had to take to get back to where I had parked my old Citroën Ami 8. It was 4:30pm and the light was dimming fast, this was a very long way back and I thought that next time I should bring a compass with me or maybe if the product exists on the market, a GPS tool that points to where your vehicule is parked (that's exactly what I need in fact). I always walk straight through the woods, leaving the forest roads or lanes behind and one time or another I loose my orientation, especially on rainy days like these when there is no sun to help.A Wood Hedgehod in its setting of dead leavesThe Wood Hedgehog is a wonderful small mushroom. In the Loire it is usually white but in other places it can be lightly beige or orange. It is regognozeable because it has hundreds of tiny spikes underneath, these cute stalagtites-looking spores break up as soon as you touch them. The mushroom doesn't rot and while the Boletus rapidly deteriorates when the weather is rainy and with the attacks of worms, the Wood Hedgehog stays healthy through the first weeks of autumn's cold nights. For some reason, the slugs aren't interested in the wood hedgehogs and this helps keep them in good condition too. As I said in an earlier post a couple years ago, these mushrooms stay well preserved long after having been picked and you can store them in the fridge for a while.
While spotting a Boletus is arduous at this time of the year because the mushroom's upper surface melts so well among the same-color dead leaves, the difficulty with the Wood Hedgehog is that it likes to grow underneath the dead leaves cover, and you usually spot only a tiny patch of the mushroom. Happily, as it is white, you have some help from mother Nature here with the contrast from the surrounding leaves. Sometimes it even grows under surface roots or ivy and thus it takes a circumvoluted shape as it tries nonetheless to rise toward the light. That's also a reason why I like this mushroom, I like the way it makes its nest under the natural carpet of dead leaves and surface roots. On the taste side, it is not as tasty as the Boletus but there's a crunchy side that I like, and plus it never rots, all the Wood Hedgehogs that I picked this weekend were in perfect condition.Scene in the woodsOnce again I'm thinking that I leave aside so many mushrooms that are maybe edible and delicious. B. offered me a pocket book with pictures of mushroom, edible or not, to select the types of mushrooms encountered in the woods. That's really a pocket book and I'll think to take it each time. But I'm happy to have left these beautiful yellowish mushrooms untouched on ther moss bed, that's also the beauty of these walks. What you see here will be gone in a couple of weeks and every year offers a different wonder. And few people seem to come enjoy the visual feast. With the rainy weather, the mud on the forest lanes and the fact that many people think that the mushroom season is way behind us now, I was almost alone (if not with these hunters on the far side of the forest) in a wooded dream land. My message is this : I don't remember if the suggestion came from 1960s' activists like Jerry Rubin or Abbie Hoffman, but throwing their tv sets out the window would indeed allow people to enjoy more real life experiences like this one...Smart camouflageThere's another reason why people should consider going more in the woods for mushrooms : that's food, and real food for this one. At a time when revenues and incomes are shrinking, it's not negligible to get this alternative to meat (and what an onctuous alternative !) in your plate several days in a row. On certain years the picking is so successful that I give part of my findings in garbage bags to local people that I know make cans themselves with the bonanza. I myself bought last summer a "lessiveuse" on a flea market for 5 Euro for this purpose but this year wasn't as rich in terms of mushroom volumes compared with some of the past years, so I didn't use it yet. A lessiveuse is a big light-metal container with a lid in which you boil and sterilize canned food. It's pretty much still in use in the countryside by people who find thus a way to eat their garden vegetables through the winter. I bought also 6 re-usable glass containers for this canned food at 0,5 Euro each, also on a flea market (vide-grenier). All you need is add a bit of water with the mushrooms in the glass cans, put the disposable rubber band to close them airtight and boil the whole batch of glass cans in the lessiveuse for a few minutes. In a typical lessiveuse you can pile up nearly 10 glass cans depending of their size, and if I remember the recipe, you put the water in the lessiveuse to boil for ten minutes and that's it, you're stocked for winter. The mushrooms don't need to be in impeccable condition for this conservation method, as opposed to the drying method where there a great risk of deterioration by rot.Slow cooking on the wood cookstoveNow, I had this mix of Boletus and Wood Hedgehogs and I decided to make a full frying pan of them. I has already some pork breast that had been on the stove for hours (I didn't expect this miraculous harvest in the woods) and although utterly delicious, I knew that this type of meat would leave aromatic room for the mushrooms. For the anectode, the pork breast slice was a salty one, I had put it to boil in water with some ungrinded, unbleached sea salt (the goal here being to avoid having the pork looses its salty nature in an unsalted water) in which I added a couple of sliced onions, some pepper and some Rosmarin picked in the garden. Always be very optimistic in your preparation of mushrooms as they always shrink dramaticly in the pan : the pic on the right shows how my overwhelming pan load turned into a modest portion after several minutes of cooking. For the frying of the mushrooms, I didn't add salt except when served in the plate. I added some sliced garlic, and the pan had got a bit of cooking oil beforehand. You can either cook it open or put a lid to slow the evaporation of the water (much of the size shrinking has to do with this water going away).
As you may notice on the picture on the side, the frying stage blurred somehow the difference in color between the Boletus and the Wood Hedgehob, they're all sort of beigeish now, and it's hard to say which is which. It's up to your taste but I personally prefer to have the mushroms well cooked (and shrinked), but stopping before they're too dry. Ideally, it's good to keep the pieces a bit soft and with an onctuous structure.(almost) Winter mushrooms timeNow comes the reward time for this adventure under the rain in the relative wilderness of a Loire forest. Rain was probably the worse thing (with the fact that I walked kilometers by consequence of loosing my orientation) experienced that weekend : it was at times a very heavy rain albeit with thin drops and the water sneaked through my rain coat.
I didn't look that far for the wine paring that day, and this Alsace Pinot Noir 2007 that I opened as apéritif happened to be a very good match. I bought a 12-bottle case two years ago from this winery (through an intermediary who buys regularly from them) because I had had at that time a very good red from this Alsace winery (Jean-Paul Schaffhauser in Wettolsheim). That's probably what we'd call a conventional winery in terms of viticulture and vinification techniques, but I liked very much the character and pleasure of this Pinot Noir back then, and its price was astoundly cheap : There are two Pinot Noir wines at Jean-Paul Schaffhauser, one aged partly in foudres/partly in stainless-steel vats (the Pinot Noir Reserve, which is the one I tried) at 4,3 Euro, and the other aged in casks (named Elevé en Fûts de chêne) at 5,2 Euro. That's amazingly cheap.
Two years being a minimum to enjoy fully what a Pinot Noir (and several other red varieties btw) can offer, that was the right time to begin drink the wine. It is still very fruity. Very enjoyable wine, I downed pretty well most of this bottle by myself I must concede, between the apéritif and the dinner and had no hangover or any bad side effect that often come with biotech-manipulated wines. This 2007 was maybe less structured than the one I had two years ago (probably a 2005) but the overall experience was pleasant.
On the wine-pairing side, this Pinot Noir was not a bad match, its light tannins and seemingly light acidity didn't overwhelm the smooth suavity and fleshily aromas of the mushrooms (the Boletus's onctuosity had taken over the more neutral Wood Hedgehogs here). ...........
Now this video is a bit long (9 minutes) and I'll try to make much shorter videos in the future. Another thing is that it's pretty shaky, you must have done it once to realize how it's difficult to cut mushrooms with one hand, film with the other and keep an eye on both operations all the while....Toward the middle of this simple scene, it begins to rain again which adds another layer of difficulty. When I shot this scene, I was already lost in the woods but didn't know it yet...
Videos on wineterroirs will be more ambiance and simple-life-scenes oriented than wine gossip reports and interviews.

Comments

[hikalu]

What a beautiful autumn leaves and big mushroom! How did you learn to choose eatable mushrooms? Aren't there some poisonous mushrooms in the forest? The meal looks delicious. It will go together with wine!

[Andrew]

Lovely story and video. The trees in that forest appear to be very young. Was it formerly pasture land?

[Ron]

I have to say that one of the things I like most about visiting this blog periodically is the photography that accompanies your articles. Lovely.

[Bertrand]

Thank you for the comments !
Hikalu : That's not that difficult to recognize the edible mushrooms forv me as I limited my selection to usually two "species", the Boletus and the Wood Hedgehogs, plus sometimes the [in French] Girolles and the Pleurotes. But now, I have this small book with many others, so I'll try to widen my hunt...
Andrew : It has never been a pasture but it is privately owned and they may cut the trees to make money from time to time even if only every 50 years.
Ron : thanks a lot, I'll be careful that the video never cannibalize the pictures here....

[Alex]

That meal looks exquisite. I am so jealous!

[Gottfried]

Very good! Autumn in the Woods is perfect!