Disclaimer first: I’m talking here about the mushrooms with the botanical name boletus edulis, of which I found out that they can be referred to as porcini, penny bun or cep. I’m not sure which is the common name, so I’ll use porcini, which is the closest match my dictionaries gave me. Please educate me if I’m wrong with that.
Anyway, I love those mushrooms, and I sometimes pick them myself, but of course that’s limited to the right season. Fresh ones are rarely for sale where I live, and if they are, I can’t afford them. But recently, a nearby supermarket offers them either dried or canned for reasonable prices. Now I want to try them, but wonder which is the better choice. According to my experience with other mushrooms, the canned ones are rather bland, especially they usually lack that typical mushroom flavor. OTOH, I tried dried porcini once years ago, but really don’t remember the taste, which is a sign that I was underwhelmed then.
Can someone recommend whether dried or canned is the better alternative?
(If it matters, I plan to cook them with onions, herbs and cream for a pasta sauce.)
The dried ones have a very intense mushroom flavour - in fact, they’re really used more as a spice than an ingredient (even when fresh, this fungus is quite soft and delicately textured - so tends to be shaved thin or chopped small and used mainly for its flavour).
Rehydrate the dried ones in water for a few hours before adding them to dishes - the soaking water can be used as stock. If you had them in the past and thought they were bland, it may not have been ceps at all - maybe dried shiitake or something.
I’ve never used canned, but I use dried porcinis all the time. If you buy a quality brand, they are delicious - very fragrant & tasty. If you don’t remember the taste when you’ve had them before, I’d say you had a lower quality brand. The good ones are extremely good. Most recently, I bought Urbani brand, and they’re easily the highest quality I’ve had. (Yes, $50 for a pound is pricey - but that amount lasts for a long time, and compared to the little packages of an ounce or two that you get at the grocery store for $7-$10, they’re cheap).
However, they are not substitutes for fresh mushrooms. They’re almost more of a spice. The texture is such that you wouldn’t want them to be the only mushroom in the pasta sauce you mention, they’re kinda rubbery when reconstituted.
What would work is use fresh mushrooms of some sort, and add some reconstituted dried porcinis. They’ll lend their wonderful flavor to the lower-quality mushrooms and the whole dish will pop. Also - you reconstitute them by adding hot water, and the resulting liquid also adds a lot of flavor to anything. It’s like instant mushroom broth.
Dried. I seldom bother to reconstitute them; if they’re going in in pieces, it’s in a cook-down-slowly tomato sauce, so the whole job gets done as it goes along and I don’t lose any of the flavour. Though everyone’s right that if you do soak them, it is a sin against the baby Fungus to throw the liquor away. But not for hours. Twenty minutes sounds about right. But I tend to crumble a few slices almost to powder and put it in… well, pretty much anything. Scrambled egg, fried onions, gravy, cream sauce, you name it. There’s nothing you can’t improve with porcini!
I use cold water - I guess it’s a couple of hours because it’s one of those preparation steps - put the mushrooms in to soak, then put the container in the fridge so it will be ready when I want it for cooking. Never really thought about the minimum necessary time.
That’s exactly what I did the first time I used dried porcini, and most probably the reason I’ve got no good memories of the sauce I made then.
I think I’ll take that advice and use dried porcini together with fresh white mushrooms (agaricus).
I’m getting hungry thinking about scrambled eggs flavored with porcini. I’ll definitely try that too.
Now it seems to be established that the dried variant is the better choice. But has anybody ever tasted canned porcini? Is there any worth to them at all?