Wild Mushroom Stuffing Recipe -

Wild Mushroom Stuffing Recipe

This is a brilliant generic wild mushroom stuffing recipe that can be served as an accompaniment to many dishes or stuffed into meats for roasting, as well as inside entire root vegetables like butternut squash. Shop bought mushrooms can be used of course but a wild mixed mushroom mix should give the deep flavours you only get with wild mushrooms.

Ingredients

30g dried porcini (or other dried wild mushrooms)
400g hen of the woods (separate the fronds) – or other wild mushroom
400g Girolles (trimmed, cleaned but as as whole as possible) – or other wild mushroom
3 shallots finely diced
6 cloves garlic finely diced
1 bunch of thyme (leaves picked)
1 bunch of parsley
140g hazelnuts
400g breadcrumbs or stale bread blitzed into breadcrumbs
100ml pomace olive oil (or cooking oil)
3 bay leaves
Seasoning to taste

Method

Preheat oven to 180 degrees.
Pour boiling water onto the dried porcini (350ml approx) and leave to rehydrate.
In a roasting tray place the hazelnuts into the oven and roast for 12 minutes.
Meanwhile, in a large pan add the oil and once hot add the shallots & garlic and cook until translucent but not colouring / browning it should take about 8 minutes.
By now you can remove the hazelnuts from the oven and set aside (once cool we can rub them in between our hands and the brown skin will come away which is bitter and a texture best removed but not essential).
With a serrated spoon remove the porcini from the mushroom stock and chop finely. Add these into the pan with the shallots and garlic and then add the picked thyme, bay leaves and other prepped wild mushrooms.
At this point, the mushrooms will most likely release a lot of liquid which we can cookout.
Once we have some browned and tender mushrooms without much residual liquid at the bottom it’s ready to season and place into a bowl to cool.
Once it’s cool enough to mix in the breadcrumbs do so and taste. If it is too dry then you have 50ml of porcini liquid to add but leave the very last bit in the bowl as it will be grit from the mushrooms which need discarding.

You can keep it like this until you’re ready to enjoy it. To finish it off:

Use as an accompaniment by baking it for 45 minutes in a greased roasting tray and/lined with parchment and covered with foil.
After 45 minutes remove the foil and cook for another 10 minutes. Otherwise stuffed into meat, root vegetables or even a giant puffball if you are lucky enough.