Blue Oyster Alla Gricia with Chef Zion
I've really been loving the product that's coming out of Southwest Mushrooms, and I've been implementing it in a lot of the dishes I'm using at Triado currently. Uh, one of my favorite pastas is a great Roman classic known as pasta allegricha, so it's kind of a spin on that classic. So first, you get some good guanchale, which is cured pork jowl with black pepper. So I'll just go into that, break it open, and you want a good kind of long dice. So let's get that out of there.
So pork chow is really fatty, really salty. And I'll just cut nice big pieces out of it. I'll take that, set that aside. Next, I like to work with my mushrooms with scissors. It works a lot easier just over a container.
Bust them open. Beautiful blue oyster mushrooms, and I'd always recommend investing in really good shears for that. So I like to take those mushrooms. If they're pretty big, I like to make them into manageable pieces to eat. So I'll just go ahead, take my knife, cut them in a little, just, you know, different shapes.
Doesn't have to be perfect. Cool. Now that we have that prepped, I like to put the guanchale on heat. You want to render some of that fat out. So this isn't a fast process.
You kind of want to let it slowly run out because if you go too fast, it'll burn. So I put it on about a low medium heat. Yeah, so guanciale is a cut on the pig that comes from the jowl, most notably from Italy. And like I said, pasta lagricha is one of the big four Roman pasta classics. And, uh, so it has guanciale, pecorino romano.
It's much like a cachua pepe minus the butter. So I just like to keep that moving so it doesn't burn. Even turn it a little bit lower. It's a slow process, but I assure you, it's worth it. When you start to notice that it's about halfway there, this is when I like to add the mushrooms.
So you just want to make sure they get in that fat. The mushrooms are a really great vehicle for the pork's flavor, especially once it loses a lot of its moisture. It has the ability to absorb other moisture, other liquids, and in this case, the fat from the guanciale. So at this point, I'll turn it up just a little bit, around medium. Throw some fresh garlic in there.
I'll just smash it by hand. You can kind of let it sit for a little second, just let it develop a crust. You want a little bit of crisp, but you still want a little bit of that meaty texture that comes with oyster mushrooms. You can notice that it develops the crust a little when it starts to stick a little bit. No worries, it'll lift after you, uh, after it develops a full crust.
As you can see here, it's what I love about oyster mushrooms. Perfect for a good sear, and the the fat from the guanchali just makes it perfect. So yeah, I'll lift them at this point a little bit. I'll notice some of that crisp. I don't want them to get too crispy because then they'll dry out and you'll lose a lot of that great texture you get with oyster mushrooms, like I said.
So let that move around a little bit. A little more that crust. Grab a couple fresh bay leaves. These grow at the downtown pizzeria, courtesy of Chris Bianco. So what I like to do with these, especially to open up the fragrance, is to give them a good little snip.
Helps open the cell walls of the leaves. They're pretty glossy leaves, so you just want to do that. Take that little extra step, really release that flavor. At this point, I like to add a little bit of good flaky salt, keeping in mind that the guanciale already has some, a fair amount of salt, but this is just for the mushrooms, really. So just really lightly crushing it.
Between your fingers just to absorb some of that salt, but not too much. All right, so now I have a fair amount of browning on the mushrooms. Go ahead and shut that off. So there's a lot of fat that pools at the bottom of the pan, so I like to use a good slotted spoon just to, you know, gather what's cooked in the pan, but not so much of the fat. I don't really need so much of that.
Maybe throw a bay leaf on there on the side. Now for some of our finishers, I like to do some fresh lemon juice. This is courtesy of Golo Family Farms here in Phoenix, and we can't have a good pasta la gricha inspired dish without Pecorino Romano. A lot of people like to use pepper grinders with metal burrs, but we like to do it with a mortar and pestle. You don't get as much of a consistent grind on a lot of these conventional, like, pepper mills, so I like to hand, you know, break it so I can really see what I'm working with, especially to smell the aromatics of the.
So I'll add a little bit of that pepper on top. Good stuff. You know why not a little bit of lemon zest, you know, for a little zip, a little sweetness to contrast a lot of that fattiness that we have in there, and some of our chili oil made with Calabrian chilies. All right, man. Yeah, I guess let's, uh, dig in and check it out.
Yeah, give it a try. All right, let's see. Very good. So yeah, the mushroom picked up a lot of that porky flavor from the guanchale. Fantastic.
Yeah, I see what you mean, but the mushrooms just picking up that, it complements them amazingly. Yup. And, um, was it guan chabe or guanchali? Guanchole. It's amazing, man.
And if you can't find guanchali, which it can be kind of tricky to find, I would recommend substituting with maybe even speck, which is a smoked ham, or maybe even just bacon. Um, but at the end of the day, if you can find, like, an Italian grocery store, you can probably count on them having guanciale. Sounds great, man. Definitely going to be looking into them, making this myself. Absolutely.
Trying to recreate that. What other kind of dishes do you utilize the blue oyster mushroom for? I enjoy using them in one of our bean dishes that we had currently that was cannellini beans kind of stewed together. The oyster mushrooms kind of added, like, a, like, a meatier aspect to it. Definitely.
Yeah, this is pretty versatile mushroom. I mean, I just throw it in anything that calls for mushrooms. Yeah, yeah, we served it with our steak, and we were marinating these with just vinegar, some herbs, just just a really good vehicle for, like I said, flavors, really good vehicle for textures, and some of that woodiness that you get from it. It's just really comforting, so I really do enjoy these, these oyster mushrooms. Every time you bring them, they just look fantastic, so thank you.
Hey, thank you guys. Yeah, that's awesome, man. Yeah, when did you find your love for, um. So I was probably around the age of 16 or so, and I was living in North Carolina, and I was working with farms, in particular a organic research farm in, in North Carolina. We did a lot of work around sustainability and around new farm practices, and out on the farm I would find these wild mushrooms, and I always thought they looked just so amazing and incredible, and I read a lot about them and how versatile they can be, how they can, you know, break down plastics and, and clean up pollutants as well as just so many other things, and not to mention, they taste great.
So I can't agree with you more, and yeah, same here. As far as the age of like 15, 16, I got into mushrooms for kind of similar reasons, just real fascinated on how the whole life cycle is. And how they can just take over all this waste, whether it be organic or even some stuff that's like, you know, toxic in a way, and just like reutilize it and break it down and kind of act as an earth's natural, uh, immune system, or like, you know, chemistry labs in a way that just break things down and reassimilate them into better things. So yeah, good stuff, man. It's amazing too.
Great. Yeah. Do you have any kind of like tips for people to or us to avoid when cooking mushrooms? A big one that a lot of people make is definitely over salting mushrooms. They shrink quite a bit, and if you overcook them and they shrink, a lot of that saltiness will go directly inside the mushroom, and you've pretty much botched the whole thing.
So, you know, if it's your first time cooking mushrooms, take it easy on the salt and the seasoning, and maybe just try it, you know, to little to no salt, uh, just so you can get an idea of what. You're working with, yeah, I totally agree. I think that's one of the biggest things that I've seen, is just using too much seasoning with mushrooms that really require just like a crack or a dash of pepper, exactly, a pinch of salt, I agree, and you're good to go. I agree in there, so I agree with you, man. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Sweet. Yeah, what I really love about this dish is it's just really comforting. It's kind of a play, like I said, on an old Italian classic. And it just incorporates something that I love so much, you know, mushrooms, into a lot of the things that I do daily, which is making pastas and just learning the history of food itself, not just Italian food history, but how you can utilize ingredients and where those ingredients come from. Most definitely.
I definitely think it's awesome. Food is fantastic. And yeah, anybody checking this out, hit up uh Trotto here and come see Chef Zion and enjoy some of this wonderful, wonderful food. Sweet. Thanks again. Thanks you.