Mushrooms forever a flavorful, fancy fungi

Max Jacobson

Wednesday, May 16, 2001 | 8:32 a.m.

Mushrooms traditionally abound after a spring rain, so this is definitely the season for them.

Most of us are familiar with the white mushrooms prevalent in markets. Other well-known varieties, such as crimini and its upscale cousin portobello (actually just a large cultivated crimini) continue to be popular. Some say a grilled portobello approximates the taste of a good steak. That may be true, but exotic it isn't.

Las Vegas has lots of places to buy fresh and exotic mushrooms an impressive variety of different species sold in multiple venues. We're talking porcini, morels, oyster mushrooms, black trumpets, chanterelles, fresh shiitake, enoki and more. These terrific fungi are used to enhance sauces, risottos, salads and any number of recipes, and the idea is not to be intimidated by them. Some of them look odd. But most of them are great, and they make a nice change from blander white mushrooms.

Before listing the places to buy these fungi, a brief description of a few is in order. So here's a little tome on exotic mushrooms, followed by places to buy them:

They are used in soups, salads and rice casseroles, and are powerfully delicious.

They have their own Web page: morels.com. At the earthy.com website, there is a nice recipe for morels with asparagus and fresh pasta. This weekend, the annual Morel Festival in Bayne City, Mich., is being held.

The one downside to this expensive mushroom is that only an expert is advised to pick them. False morels are toxic, and contain a neurotoxin called MMH.

They are also wonderful when grilled and the French know them as cepes.

The French like to eat them sauteed in butter and then mixed with a soft cheese on crusty hunks of bread.

All these mushrooms and a few others also crop up in town. Here is where to find them:

Starting with the major supermarkets, Smith's has a fine selection of exotic mushrooms that are pre-packaged by Monterey Mushrooms. Shiitake are $3.49 for a 3.2-ounce package, while enoki and oyster mushrooms are $2.99 for a box of the same size.

You'll also want to check seasonal availability of different exotic mushrooms here. Sometimes they have black trumpets, hedgehogs and chanterelles.

There is one more option when you're buying exotic mushrooms, that you can exercise whenever you can't get what you want fresh. That would be to go the dried mushroom route. What you may wish to do here is reconstitute the dried mushrooms in warm water, and then add them to your recipes. You may also wish to save the water for stocks.

This isn't quite as much as it seems. According to Owen Rice, a spokesman for Mycological, mushrooms are consistent in that it takes 10 pounds of fresh mushrooms to produce one pound of dried mushrooms. But even at that ratio, buying morels dried, as opposed to at FreshPoint of Las Vegas, is about 1 1/2 times more expensive.

Incidentally, there are recipes and product descriptions for these mushrooms on their website, mycological.com.