The Best Way to Eat a Wild Puffball Mushroom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNXxgb_WPg4

OK so this weekend I picked, cooked, and ate a wild puffball mushroom. I tried to cook it up a whole bunch of different ways because I’ll be honest, I’d never cooked one of these before. After lots of internet research and dirty dishes I came up with a few ways to try cooking it up.

Stir-fry with Coconut Oil – I’m not a huge mushroom eater so I wanted to start out with something that I figured had a low chance of being disgusting. I’ve been addicted to coconut oil the past few days and I’m a firm believer that if you add enough onion to something it will taste just fine. Sure enough, this turned out great. The mushroom didn’t taste like mushroom at all! It just tasted warm like coconut oil and onion.

Stir-fry with Olive Oil – After success with the coconut oil I wanted to see how different the stir-fry would be with olive oil. It made a huge difference. This time, while not over-powering, you could certainly taste the mushroom. I suppose this might be a good option if you want to taste mushroom, but if you’re just looking for a free and easy cooking ingredient you probably want to stick to the coconut oil.

French Toast – This was a big one. It seemed everywhere on the internet I saw people raving about how fantastic this mushroom french toast is so I made some up. I’m now convinced that this is a giant internet conspiracy to get people from cooking up puffball mushrooms. It was disgusting. Mushrooms were probably not meant to be drown in maple syrup. I wouldn’t ever make this again.

Scrambled Eggs – Not bad. It was a lot like any other mushroom being added to your eggs though. It probably would have been a bit better had I found some hot sauce, but alas, it seems I was out.

Soup – Who doesn’t like soup? After browning the mushroom up I made a kind of miso soup with it. It was completely fine, but I wasn’t that thrilled with it because it is soup after all. You could toss nearly anything in beef bullion and have it come out tasting like beef bullion.

So, I highly recommend a coconut oil stir-fry if you’re looking for a recipe to cook up that puffball in your yard. It’s pretty simple to do. I even made a quick youtube video showing what I did. You can make this up in just a few minutes if you have the ingredients on hand.

You might wonder, why all the fuss? Why go to all the work to make something out of a dirty wild mushroom. Well, mostly because I wanted to try it, but there are some great nutritional and economical reasons too! First off, that coconut oil stir-fry dish (had I cooked up the whole mushroom) could have easily feed a family of 4-6. If you figure in 2 onions, 3 peppers, the oil, and the spices you’re looking at a meal that costs about $3 per person. Probably less, because you wouldn’t even use all of the spices and oil!

As for nutrition, mushrooms are known for being high in vitamin D and B, but they also have high amounts of important minerals like Potassium, Iron and Zinc! They even have protein. I mean, it’s a lot of nutrition bang for your buck. So if you see a giant puffball around your yard you might want to try cooking it up.