Wild Chanterelle Mushrooms - foraged from Alaskan Wilderness - Cooked to Perfection

Aloha from Alaska. Buddy, Justin, and I decided to come here to the Prince of Wales Island in southeast Alaska just to bunker down and have some family time. Summer has ended and fall is here. Some days are just stormy and gray and other days feel like summer. It's not our year. But one really sweet thing about the rain is that it made our very first adventure possible. Our friends Micah and Rufus, who also run the lodge, they have been going chanterelle hunting and so they offered to bring us along and show us the ropes. It actually started off super miserable. Like the terrain was super thick. Buddy wasn't having any of it. The trees were like super pokey and scratching him in the face. The bugs were biting us and on top of all of that we were finding zero chanterelles. We saw a whole bunch of other kinds of mushrooms but not what we were looking for. But after our struggle we ended up finding friendly terrain and it was like mossy and beautiful and open. No more pokey trees in our face. Buddy stopped crying. In fact he got naked and happy and then we found chanterelles. And I mean holy adult easter egg hunt. It was so fun. I could not contain myself. We struck gold. Isn't that cool? So fun. Gorgeous. Wow. Our baby's crying and it's not even bothering me because of this. Look at this and there's some right behind you too. Okay let's keep going. So a lot of times what I just learned is that these chanterelles are kind of like in these little dens. If you kind of dig away it'll expose it and sometimes it'll expose a whole family of them. This is only a small tiny portion of what we found. I just want to kind of show you the gist of how I cooked them up. I don't like to wash my mushrooms. I don't like to just you know put water on them because they're like sponges and they just soak up the water and I don't want that. So really just wiped it down every little part with a nice microfiber cloth this morning. It was quite therapeutic. And now fire up the stove. It's a little grungy. How's it having real flame? Oh yeah it's nice. I love working with real flame. The thing about when you come to cabins is that there's always going to be so much random stuff from people who might have stayed before you and that's what I'm working with here. And my point is that normally I would think if I went mushroom hunting for something as beautiful as the chanterelle mushroom I would really want high quality olive oil or high quality butter. We don't have any of that. So what we have is a huge thing of organic coconut oil. So I'm going to go ahead and be pretty generous with that coconut oil. So we are going to use ingredients that go good with coconut oil. Over here I already went ahead and I have some garlic, green onions, a little bit of ginger minced up, and this is cilantro. Okay I think oil is nice and hot. So I'm going to start with the really big mushrooms. I'm not even going to cut them. So I'm just going to be putting the big ones in first. So I think what you're going to notice right away is those mushrooms they soaked up all that coconut oil. I put in kind of a lot of coconut oil and they soaked it up immediately and now they're releasing. And what they're releasing isn't the oil but now they're releasing their own liquids, their own water. Especially these fresh wild chanterelles. I've never seen mushrooms give off so much liquid. With that being said I think I'm going to add the rest. It smells to me like fresh baked bread. Can you kind of smell that Justin? Garlic is something where you want, you know, you want it kind of brown, you want it sauteed, you want it that roasted garlic taste. We don't want just simmered garlic so I'm not going to add anything yet. I've learned to really appreciate quiet these days because we don't get much of it. The savage is sleeping. Okay so now it's a good time to take a look at this pan because you can see all that liquid has now been sucked and soaked back into those mushrooms. So I'm going to add the garlic because now it's garlic hitting a hot pan, not just water. And I'm going to go ahead and add these green onions. I wouldn't necessarily say as strong as ginger but just a little bit, you know, it's really going to complement all these flavors because I'm going to do something else. I have a spice here I'm going to use. So this is all inspired again by the random ingredients we have here and one of the ingredients is turmeric. In Hawaii we call turmeric olena. And one thing I'm really happy that we found here is kosher salt. Salt that has some beautiful texture and kosher is just one of the best. We do have some black pepper. Might as well. Why not? So some of the liquid might have gotten evaporated and cooked off but most of it honestly just got sucked right back into the mushrooms where it came from to begin with. These things are true sponges and they hit heat and they release and then they take it all back. Okay hit it with some cilantro. You know now we have this dry pan and the garlic and all these beautiful herbs are starting to kind of stick to the pan and when we hit it with something that has acid like lime juice it's going to deglaze all that flavor. We achieved what we were trying to do. We get some brown tips and edges but still juicy juicy not dried out mushroom. Bon Appetit. Look at that Justin. Wild chanterelles. Oh my gosh like I don't know if I can explain how much mushroom hunting has always been this like lifelong dream of mine and so even being able to just say that out loud. Wild chanterelles. You have no idea how much this bite means to me. Wow that is freaking delicious and it doesn't taste um sounds weird but it doesn't taste like overly Asian in the flavors. I would not even say I could taste the coconut oil and with ginger you really have to kind of lean in to know what it is and I think that's just because these mushrooms have such this beautiful flavor of their own this beautiful earthy goodness that that is what overwhelms your palate that and the garlic which is never a bad thing in my opinion and it doesn't just release a whole bunch of juice it's not like that but it is moist it is fleshy it is delicate and yet it has substance. Those are not contradictions those are all equal parts of harmony. Here you go honey. That is a nice bite. Wow tell me about it. You're gonna have to choose one ingredient to go on a pizza and be that. I don't know what to say I just I just have to express that my soul feels so happy like there's just something about this about when I am able to get out there literally get my hands dirty and especially harvest something I've never never experienced but the first time and that is like blow my mind happiness and so my soul is smiling right now and I hope yours is too. I know that's corny but I do and I hope that you can appreciate the beauty of this wild harvest and the simplicity of this deliciousness and more than anything I want to say thank you so much for joining us and this is just a little taste of Alaska but we'll be giving you a lot more so please do subscribe and we'll see you back next week.