Midsummer is one of the most beautiful times for the kitchen. Above all, he is one of the most grateful. This is of course because so many great ingredients have at least overlapping harvest dates; in a market you just don’t know where to go first. It is therefore best to throw together as much as possible, for example chanterelles, tomatoes and yellow stone fruit such as apricots, apricots, plums or peaches.
The chutney cook Susann Till from Stade near Hamburg offers an orientation for why this goes well together. As a trained seamstress, she actually comes from the fashion industry, but after a serious illness she became self-employed as a culinary entrepreneur at the age of 69 (!). Till (bysusann.de) also goes back to the fact that she often combines fruit and vegetables according to colour, which she thinks is fun, looks good and tastes good in most cases. An approach that at least partially underpins the aroma theory, with biochemical arguments that would lead too far here. However, the fact that ingredients can, within certain limits, be combined according to color is also shown by the highly aesthetic cuisine of the German-Swiss star chef Tanja Grandits.
Chanterelles also go well with potato salad
In the “Narbasu” restaurant in Asturias, Spain, they turn the unbeatably golden summer combination – chanterelles, yellow cherry tomatoes and peaches in an approximate ratio of 2:1:1 – into a salad that is as simple as it is elegant fourth yellow-orange swab. The Narbasu, which is also a hotel, is quite isolated on the edge of the Picos de Europa, the kitchen is pleasantly vegetable-friendly for the otherwise hearty Asturias (tomato stuffed with tomato!) and in an unpretentious way fine, which is mainly due to the freshness and quality of the ingredients. From the in-house vegetable garden, the cook and gardener have a view of the mountain peaks, which are layered one after the other to form a relief of grandiose depth. On the one hand, a beautiful view is not a big deal in Asturias, in travel guides about the autonomous Spanish province there are sometimes sentences like “Similar to Switzerland, only with the Atlantic”, which is not exaggerated. For this food column, the view is important insofar as it is once again proof that you can taste the beauty of a place – be careful, it’s almost Buddhist now.
For the salad, the cubes of a ripe peach were roasted very briefly, the cherry tomatoes were simply quartered, for the cucumber-grassy sidekick everything was supplemented with a few briefly blanched, al dente cubes of zucchini and decorated with strips of zucchini blossoms. The chanterelles had previously been pickled and marinated, which can be done in (possibly seasoned) brine. You can also fry the mushrooms briefly or steam them in water (1 l for 500 g mushrooms) with a good gulp of vinegar at a low temperature in the oven (about 120-140 degrees) and then let them steep briefly in their own juice. At the end, save 1-2 tablespoons of the mushroom water for the vinaigrette. The salad dressing should be mixed with a mildly fruity, low-acid vinegar, with a little mustard, salt and pepper, and a rather neutral oil, so that the main ingredients can shine. But a delicate nutty oil also goes well. The most popular summer mushroom in Central Europe, which has fruity but also peppery notes, is flexible and invites you to experiment. The tomatoes for the salad can of course also be red or green instead of yellow and the peach can be an apricot, for example. Avocado and a little fine leaf lettuce are just as good in this combination as some fried pancetta or a few roasted seeds. You should only treat this noble mushroom to good ingredients.
Judging by how popular chanterelles are in Germany, the recipes (also in the cookbooks, by the way) should be a little more delicate here. In order to celebrate the taste of the mushroom, cream sauces, pumpkin soup inserts or schnitzel accompaniments are sometimes not enough advice. In the relatively new volume “Mushroom cuisine. 100 recipes for collectors and connoisseurs” (Tre Torri) there is a rather rustic chanterelle recipe that deserves attention: chanterelle potato salad. With the golden triad of the main ingredients – mushrooms, potatoes, onions – this recipe would also be proof of cooking according to colour.
For 4-6 people, boil 1 kilo of new, waxy potatoes, such as Annabelle, in salted water, allow to cool slightly, peel and cut into slices. Briefly sauté the cubes of a medium-sized onion in 2 tablespoons of rapeseed or sunflower oil until translucent, increase the temperature slightly and fry 500 g of cleaned chanterelles (do not wash, otherwise they will suffer, but use a kitchen brush to remove the sand). Deglaze everything with 3 tbsp apple cider vinegar, pour in 350 ml meat or vegetable stock, bring to the boil briefly and season with 1 tsp mustard, pepper and salt. Pour this mushroom stock while still warm over the potato slices, add 1 bunch of chopped chives, carefully fold in everything, let the salad soak briefly and eat lukewarm. If you like, mix in some lamb’s lettuce before serving.