Roasted Mushrooms

My favorite mushrooms are hard to find out here on the west coast, whereas they grow wild  in huge colonies in the northeast. They're an amateur forager's dream, in that they're excellent tasting, grow to be huge, and the best part, there aren't any poisonous lookalikes.

Those mushrooms are mostly known by their Japanese name, maitaki. They're also known as hen-of-the-woods back east sometimes, because they look like the back of a hen. A delicious and unique 'shroom for everyone's enjoyment.

One of my favorite ways of cooking the maitaki I'll be discussing here, with a few more notes for a meal. But I'll be using oyster mushrooms, which are pretty good as well.

You want to first crank up your oven to 500, and make sure it's pretty hot once you start. Cut off any knobby or tough parts of the stem on your mushrooms.

What follows will be fine for any kind of mushroom.

Start with some vegetable oil in your pan, and crank the heat up to high on that as well. Wait for the wisps of smoke to appear, the oil shimmering, and drop in your mushrooms, but only enough so they're not crowded. Once in, season with salt and pepper:

Let them go for maybe five to ten seconds, and then place inside the hot hot oven.

It'll take only two minutes in the oven, give or take ten to twenty seconds:

See how they're golden? Now comes the awesome, yummy finishing part: the buster basting. Drop a pat of butter, between a half tablespoon to a whole, along with a healthy amount of fresh thyme sprigs. See below:

The thyme leaves pop and fill the air with such an aroma that you'll be transported to the late eighteenth century. Using a hand-towel or oven mitt, shake the pan vigorously to foam the butter and get all the thyme popped:

Now remove the mushrooms and thyme sprigs and set them on a plate to lose some of the butter grease, maybe even using a slotted spoon to remove the 'shrooms. This pretty much a done topper now, to be placed artistically as garnish on steak or chicken dishes, or to be used in pastas, which is what I was making on this day: a pasta dish.

To do that, start with a clove of garlic, smash it, and put in in the pan with some wine for deglazing. I only had red wine at the time, but white wine is usually used.

There won't be too much to deglaze, but it'll be tasty. As the wine reduces and your kitchen now smells like a French restaurant, add some chicken stock (water will do as well, but won't taste as good), and using a spoon, break up the garlic:

Now, like any good French pan sauce, add butter, and turn off the heat:

Mix in the butter with the heat off and the sauce gets a nice coating ability, and then add your already cooked pasta. I had shells left over that I'd stored separate from the tomato based sauce from the previous evening.

That sauce coats and covers the pasta with flavor and sexy goodness, and return the mushrooms to the pan, toss everything once or twice, just to coat the mushrooms (if you want to do that, it's not necessary), and then plate it:

Awesome.

Not that anyone cares, but I scrubbed the stove top later that day...it was damn filthy and embarrassing me a bit.