A New Thanksgiving Tradition: Riced Cauliflower With Mushrooms

I first heard of riced cauliflower from my brother. He avoids carbs, shunning even bagels from Ess-a-Bagel, whose re-opening is one of the high points of 2016. He described riced cauliflower as a strange but wonderful product, made entirely of ground cauliflower but used as a rice substitute.

Whn I paid his family a visit, he presented me with riced cauliflower sauteed with a mix of onions and peppers. The dish was tasty enough for me to want to play with this new ingredient myself.

Like most people who have enjoyed riced cauliflower, my brother bought his from Trader Joe's, which offers packages of riced cauliflower in both refrigerated and frozen versions. I asked one worker which she one she recommended, and she said she preferred the refrigerated for its "fresher taste"; a co-worker overheard our conversation and said he liked the convenience of the frozen. In practice, both products are frequently out of stock, so I buy whatever is available.

You could also rice your own cauliflower, but this taste test gave higher marks to the Trader Joe's riced cauliflower than homemade - true for both the hand grated and grated by food processor. If you do go the homemade route, testing by Epicurious suggests that both hand grating and food processing work, with machine grating winning the battle of convenience. 

I tried both kinds of Trader Joe's riced cauliflower on their own the first couple of times - when I get my hands on a nice head of cauliflower I'm more likely to think roasting than pulverizing - before my mind wander to my favorite seasoning ingredient, soy sauce. If riced cauliflower was good, riced cauliflower with soy sauce was better. And if riced cauliflower with soy sauce was better, the addition of garlic or onion, the category I call "some kind of allium" (with members such as chives and garlic scapes alongside the heads-of-clan) would be better still. The additions were as tasty as I thought they'd be.

And then my gaze fell upon a package of mushrooms.

These were regular supermarket button mushrooms, full of both umami and water, not porcini dust. I loved the idea of infusing the bland rice with the flavor of mushrooms, but getting the proportions would be important.

I could have diced the mushrooms and sauteed them with the allium, then added the rice. I opted for another route: shredding.

My food processor made very quick work of the mushrooms. In the photo above, the mushrooms are nicely quartered, but I discovered I could skip this nicety and rip the head from the stem and shove the mushroom down the feeder tube. I could pile them into a four-'shoom collision and push them along to the blade. The process was oddly amusing and over quickly. 

I also shredded the allium - whatever I had around. Garlic, onion, sometimes a combo. The recipe made good use of whatever was lying around.

I think of button mushrooms as largely white, but when shredded, the dark brown gills are revealed to be a distinctive color as well.

I dumped the mushroom-allium mixture into a large skillet and added the rice and about 2 Tablespoons soy sauce and some water  - perhaps 3 Tablespoons. 

You could work more carefully - finely diced onion first, then the mushrooms, then the rice, then the soy sauce and water - but the dish cooks very quickly so the sequence is not very important. I recommend cooking the mushroom rice over medium heat and stirring it frequently. The mushrooms and the rice will extrude water, but depending on the cooking temperature, you might have to add a little water to prevent scorching. I tend to use the threat of scorching to add another swig of soy sauce. Your mushroom rice should be ready in 5-10 minutes.

What can you do with the finished product? Serve it in a bowl, or for fancy people, in individual ramekins. If you're feeling playful, make your guests guess what the hell they're eating. I predict very few people will know.

Cauliflower rice plays nicely with real rice, too. I was content to let the brown bastmati from Kalustyan's mingle on the fork, but there's no reason (other than taste, dietary restrictions, not having both on hand, etc.) not to mix the two into a super-casserole.

Mushroom riced cauliflower also lends itself to serving as stuffing. I happened to have collard greens as a side, so Stuffed Collard Greens were born. If I had planned ahead, I could have used some of those toothpicks with colorful frills to show I meant business. Keep all of these options in mind for your fancy Thanksgiving dinner.

So this Thanksgiving, when vegetarian or no-carb camps aren't the only factions, and anecdote and media report families refusing to eat together because of political divisions, it's nice to have an unexpected base of agreement that can please all sides. And for that, we could all be thankful.

'Shroomin' in Tokyo (Guest blog post from Japan)

Location: New York City (Brooklyn and the Bronx, to be exact). Some heavy rains have resulted in a bumper crop of my favorite fungus.

Meanwhile, in Tokyo my friend Hiroko was also thinking about mushrooms - albeit more productively.

Here's her guest blog post: 

As an apartment dweller in Tokyo, words like "farming" and "harvesting" don't typically come very close to me. So when I found a pile of plastic wrapped logs labeled "Shiitake Log" at the fresh produce section of my local super market, I was really skeptical. They were sold 399 yen (around $4) a piece. Seriously? Hey, a pack of Shiitake Mushroom costs about $2.99! So why not giving it a try? Even if it fails, we have nothing to lose!

The idea of farming Shiitake was an instant hit with my 8 years old son. No pets are allowed in this building, but a pet Mushroom Log? YES! With enthusiasm, we opened the plastic wrapping, but we didn't find any instruction,  just a piece of hand-written memo that said, "Remove the wrap. Spray water. In a few days, Shiitake comes." Oh thank you very much!

My son did some research and said: "My fungus needs a high moisture level." He started to spritz water on the log, twice a day, as if it was an honorable job. And really, in two days.....voila! MUSHROOMS!

Whoa! Almost too much!

Tokyo is currently in its rainy season, which is called "Tsuyu" ("Plum Rain," the annual rainy season when plums are ripening), so along with my son's diligent spritzing, the Shiitake Log is getting plenty of moisture on our balcony. Did you know 90% of a Shiitake is water? 

The Shitakes are thriving, happily popping up. Harvesting has become my son's daily routine!

Harvesting mushrooms for dinner.

Miso Soup with Shiitake and Scallions, Bean Thread (Saifun) Salad with Shiitake, Eggs and Fish Cake, Chicken Drumsticks and Eggs, Pickles

Miso Soup with Shiitake and Scallions, Bean Thread (Saifun) Salad with Shiitake, Eggs and Fish Cake, Chicken Drumsticks and Eggs, Pickles.

Double Umami

Are you biased against the humble white button mushroom?

I was.

When I say, "button mushroom," do you think of its more glamorous cousins,

Shitakes from the farmers' market

rich with flavor, or do you think of these rubbery tire bits in a can?

Manufacturer's name omitted to protect the guilty

Do you think of bits of sponge or slime - raw mushrooms - adding nothing good to salads? (And that's without even knowing about the toxic hydrazine in mushrooms that cooking neutralizes.)

No wonder I had some aversion to button mushrooms. 

And yet I loved shiitake mushrooms - fresh from the farmers' market or dried in Chinatown, where they're often known as Chinese black mushrooms. Restaurant dishes that featured wild mushrooms like chanterelles and morels were consistently thrilling, as were portobella "burgers" eaten at restaurants and friends' barbecues, sometimes as the main vegetarian option, and at home. (Portobella or portobello? I'll go with "bella" because the small versions - more on this in a minute - are called Baby Bellas.) And I knew these favored fungi were chock full of wonderful nutritional benefits. Trumpet, Hen of the Woods, oyster - I loved them all. 

Crimini mushrooms helped me bridge the gap. 

Build a bridge with a fungus

First, I learned that "Baby Bella" was basically just a marketing term - portobellas are just more mature criminis. Then I learned that crimini are just slightly more mature and suntanned white button mushrooms.  (What this means practically is, of course, subject to debate.) 

Time for a reputation rehab! 

Last week David Tanis published an ode to this humble and overlooked mushroom in the New York Times. Others have pointed out that button mushrooms share, and sometimes exceed, the health benefits of more exotic mushroom varieties.

Would it help to call them Champignons de Paris, as the French - their original cultivators - do? Professor Brian Wansink of Cornell University has published a lot of amusing and thought-provoking research showing that that people enjoy food more if they think it's fancier, so you could try a re-branding campaign.

Or your could cook the unsung white buttons to give them a leg up. For me, this meant upping the mushrooms' umami quotient.

Umami, sometimes known as the fifth taste fifth taste (in addition to salty, sweet, bitter and sour), is the "pleasant savory taste" based upon glutamates in the food. Mushrooms are rich in umami. So are fermented products like my beloved soy sauce. 

To me, there are few cooked foods that aren't enhanced by a dash or two of soy sauce. I also believe that a good sear in a cast iron skillet is often a great flavor enhancer. (And cooking in a cast iron skillet can also add iron to your diet, by the way.) 

So I started with this,

added some potion (high octane Korean soy sauce diluted with a little water; low-salt would be a good idea if you didn't want to dilute),

Self-tanner?

And next thing you know, my buttons have gotten lacquered.

Why, you're looking positively crimini!

I have to say I was delighted with the result.

The finish line

The mushrooms were great on their own and would be a great topping for toast or pasta. Diced more finely, you could use them for bruschetta, pizza or omlets.You know, whatever you might use "fancy" mushrooms for.