A mushroom is about ninety per cent water. That single fact explains most of what goes wrong with them in a home kitchen, and it is why all six recipes below give you the same instruction in slightly different words: drive the water off first, and leave the pan alone while it happens.
Wild mushroom season across Europe runs from late August into October. That is when ceps and chanterelles turn up at markets and everyone remembers they like mushrooms. Five of these six are just as good with cultivated chestnut mushrooms from a supermarket, and two of them gain more from a handful of dried porcini than from anything fresh and expensive.
The soup is built on the soaking water
Cream of mushroom soup is a French purée: mushrooms and onion softened in butter, stock, a potato for body, cream stirred in off the heat at the end so it cannot split. Ours uses 500 g of fresh mushrooms and 20 g of dried.
Those 20 g do more work than the ratio suggests. Soak them for half an hour and the liquid they give back carries most of the flavour you are after. Strain it through paper towel to catch the grit, then pour it into the pot. Tipping it down the sink is the usual reason a mushroom soup tastes of cream and very little else. The potato is there for texture rather than flavour; it lets you blend to something velvety without reaching for more cream.
Cook the mushrooms somewhere else, then bring them back
Risotto is rice cooked in stock added a ladle at a time, and the creaminess comes from starch. There is no cream in it. Eighteen minutes once the rice goes in, and you cannot walk away.
The mushrooms are cooked first, in a wide pan on high heat, in a single layer, untouched for two or three minutes. Then they come out and wait. Cook them together with the rice and they release their water into it, the temperature drops, and the grains stew instead of toasting. They go back at around the fourteen-minute mark. The porcini soaking liquid goes into the stock, and the stock stays hot on the next burner: cold stock added to the pan is the other reliable way to spoil it.
A Russian appetiser that is really a béchamel test
Julienne has nothing to do with the French knife cut. It is a Soviet restaurant dish: chicken and mushrooms in a cream sauce, baked in small cocotte dishes under grated cheese. Six portions, twenty minutes in the oven.
The line that decides it is "sauté the mushrooms until all the liquid evaporates". Mushrooms folded into a cream sauce while still wet will thin it in the ramekin, and you get a puddle under the cheese instead of something that holds on a spoon. The nutmeg is not decoration either. Leave it out and the sauce tastes flat.
→ Chicken and mushroom julienne
The sauce is the dish and the chicken is a vehicle
Thin chicken cutlets seared in one pan, then a sauce built in the same pan on what the chicken left behind. Thirty-five minutes, nothing else to wash up.
Two things go wrong. The mushrooms go in and get stirred straight away, so they steam and turn grey instead of colouring. And the chicken is left sitting in the finished sauce while the rest of dinner comes together, which dries it out. It should go back in for a minute or two at the very end. Splitting the breasts lengthwise is worth the knife work: at three or four millimetres, overcooking them takes real effort.
→ Chicken and mushroom in creamy sauce
Filo forgives nothing wet
A tray bake of twelve filo sheets wrapped around 800 g of mushrooms and spring onion, every sheet brushed with butter stirred through chilli crisp. It lands somewhere between a börek and something out of an Asian bakery.
The filling has to be cooked until genuinely dry and then cooled to room temperature before it touches pastry. Hot filling steams the filo from the inside and the bottom layers turn to paste. Score the top before it goes in, cutting only through the upper sheets, or the whole thing shatters in every direction under the knife. Eat it within half an hour of the oven. This is the loudest dish on the list and it does not stay that way.
→ Mushroom, spring onion and chilli crisp filo bake
Cold filling, dry pastry
Wellington takes seventy-five minutes and looks like it took a day. Portobellos, duxelles, wilted spinach and caramelised onion rolled up in puff pastry.
All of it is a moisture problem. The duxelles cook until they begin to stick to the pan. The spinach gets wrung out in a cloth until a handful surrenders a tablespoon of liquid. The seared portobellos drain cap-up as they cool. Then everything goes into the fridge until properly cold, because cold filling is what keeps the base of the pastry crisp. You can assemble it a day ahead and it comes out better for the wait, which makes it the one dish here worth planning a meal around.
What to cook when
The soup and the chicken are weeknight food. Risotto counts as weeknight food only if nobody minds you standing at the stove for twenty minutes. Julienne is for when people are coming over and you want something arriving from the oven in its own dish. The filo bake and the Wellington both want a table around them, and both can be built ahead. If you have come home with a basket of wild mushrooms, put them in the risotto, where you will actually taste them.
