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4 months ago
9
Someone at Mastodon recommended Derek Sarno’s YouTube cooking channel as a fun way to learn more about simple yet bold vegan recipes that are not too daunting to make. His home kitchen videos are funny, his dog lovely, and his onion chopping skills impressive; but what impressed the most was leaving an impression on mushrooms—literally.
Derek is a big fan of squeezing every bit of taste out of a vegetable while leaving it intact. The best way to do this, is to throw it in a fiery hot cast iron pan and then throw some kind of weight on top of it: another cast iron pan. This simple technique combined with enough patience will reduce even the biggest single hunk of home-grown oyster mushrooms into a dark brown crusted mushroom steak that will explore your taste buds. Derek’s site, books, and YouTube videos perfectly illustrate this:
I love this kind of simple but bold food: by squeezing out all the moisture and grilling what’s left to let the Maillard reaction do its thing. Press down on those mushrooms!
Reproducing this at home is not difficult but our induction stove is not up to the task. Compared to a gas-fired one; it cannot blast enough heat into that pan. There are a couple of solutions for this: the BBQ, the oven, or a dedicated grill. I rely on the last two options at least twice a week:
- Whipping up some spaghetti but not sure what to pick if you don’t fancy yet another tomato sauce? Finely dice some root vegetables such as carrots and onions, chuck them on a baking sheet, add a healthy doze of olive oil and coarse sea salt, and roast in a hot oven (220 °C). The longer the veggies are in there, and the more you see stuff shrinking, the better.
- Tired of steaming those delicate white asparagus? Buy green ones, roll them in olive oil, and grill them. Warning: taste explosion hazard. These are done rather quickly so be sure not to reduce them to pulp. The season is about to end so now is your chance!
- Not interested in a raw cabbage salad that’s difficult to digest? No problem. Get out that grill, slice that (pointed) cabbage in half, trim off the round parts, take out the hard core, rub olive oil on both sides and throw on the grill. Optionally re-oil from time to time and prick a fork in there to gauge when it’s done. This can take a while. You can press down on the cabbage yourself if you want to slightly speed up the process. Again, the longer it’s in there, and the less of the cabbage that remains, the better. The result is a buttery consistency and a surprisingly soft taste.
Two pointed cabbage halves on a grill, shrunken down and almost ready to eat.
Pressing down on cabbage with cast iron pans on gas-fired stoves is a cooking technique I first encountered during my internship at bakery and restaurant De Superette in Ghent which sadly closed a few years ago. In 2015, I was there to learn about their signature sourdough loaves from Sarah Lemke, the then head baker. While doing my best to carry out all kinds of doughy assignments in my little corner next to the Italian Salva oven, I could watch the talented international crew at work, preparing all kinds of weird things for the lunch and dinner sessions later that day. And by weird, I mean weird: kimchi bootstrapped with seafood, vacuumed fermented potatoes that gave off a green hue as part of some exotic bread recipe they were trying out, pizza topped with mushrooms marinated for days in god-knows-what, …
When I eventually came back home and opened up the fridge to cook, I finally knew what to do with that cabbage. Another thing that is less evident to reproduce at home is throwing an entire cauliflower into a cooling oven after the croissant baking sheets came out. You can protect the top part with some aluminium foil in case the heating elements are still too hot.
I’d love to try and create a huge the oyster mushroom press in our own kitchen but I’d first have to grow it myself. I’ve never encountered those big hunks that Derek is sporting in any store. Most mushrooms are sold in small plastic containers, barely bigger than 10 cm, except for the portobellos you should be filling, not squashing. Or wait. Should I?
