The Vegetable-Led Plate · Sauce
Mushroom XO
- Intermediate
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, aromatics blooming from the first bite, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 50 g dried shiitake
- 300 ml just-boiled water
- 250 g king oyster mushrooms, cut in 3 mm dice
- 100 g shallots, finely sliced
- 50 g garlic, finely chopped
- 30 g fresh ginger, finely chopped
- 25 g dried red chillies, soaked and chopped
- 5 g kombu, blitzed to powder
- 20 g fermented black beans, rinsed and roughly chopped
- 350 ml neutral oil
- 40 ml light soy sauce
- 25 g soft brown sugar
- 15 ml rice vinegar
The skills inside
FermentationStraining & passing through a sieve
The words inside
King Oyster MushroomOyster MushroomShiitake
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · molluscs · soy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Soak the shiitake in the hot water 30 minutes, squeeze them dry over the bowl, chop to 3 mm dice and keep 100 ml of the strained soaking liquid. 30 min
- Warm the oil to about 140C (285F), fry the shallots until pale gold and lift them out, then the garlic and ginger for 60 seconds only, and set both aside; they will keep browning off the heat.
- Fry the two mushrooms in the same oil, 12 to 15 minutes, until the loud bubbling of escaping water quietens to a slow fizz and the pieces are shrunken and chewy at the edge. 15 min
- Return the aromatics with the chillies, black beans and kombu powder, add the soy, sugar, vinegar and reserved soaking liquid and cook 10 minutes more, until the liquid has gone and the oil sits clear on top. 10 min
- Cool completely and jar with the oil covering the solids by 5 mm; it keeps 3 weeks refrigerated and tastes better after two days.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Fermentation 53 recipes
- Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
- There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
- It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
- Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
- Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.
Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Nebbiolo (Langhe) or aged Pinot Noir
- Also Right
- White Burgundy for cream-based versions
- From the Taps
- Dubbel
- Zero-Proof
- Roasted barley tea
Earth speaking to earth: forest-floor reds echo fungal depth; truffle and Nebbiolo literally share a hillside and a season.
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