How to Cook My Ultimate Mushroom Pasta Bake in Dad's Kitchen

My kitchen it is time to cook. Today's recipe a lovely rigatoni pasta bake with wild mushrooms, garlic, thyme, some beautiful white wine and cream sauce topped with a sourdough parmesan crumb. It's going to be baked and it's going to be delicious. Right, so a pasta bake, al forno I believe the Italians call it so it's baked. I wanted to go vegetarian, it's taken from our new book, it's a lovely recipe. I wanted to show you how to get these mushrooms really meaty, cooked well, bring out all the meaty flavours and then just bake it all together in a lovely creamy white wine garlic herb sauce. It's going to be fab. First thing we need to do is get our pasta in. Now I've got rigatoni. So let's get into it and let's talk pasta. Can't even open it, weak feeble man. Right, so can we see this Carlos if I just, there we go, rigatoni. It's like tubes, you know like penne pasta but bigger and it's got ridges on it as well so all that lovely sauce is going to kind of seep in and it's going to cling on, it's going to be perfect for this dish. So big pan of water, that's a five litre cast aluminium pan full of boiling water, enough space for the pasta to kind of bounce around. It's like it needs space because it wants to release its starch which will make it nice and creamy at the end. If it's all stuck together and compact it'll stick. All right, so big pan, lots of salt, we want it salty as seawater and then to feed four we want 400 grams of pasta. Okay, so I'm just going to pop that in. It's a 500 gram bag so I've just kind of hung on to 100 grams there for another day. So let's cook that for no more than nine minutes. Now that's just enough because don't forget it's then going to go into a pan and it's going to go under the grill so it's going to have a little bit more cook time so don't be afraid of cooking it al dente, okay. It's really important so just for that little bit of bite, the best way to test is to eat it. Right, so let's do mushrooms. Nice big pan, get it hot and let's talk mushrooms. So I've got some nice big chestnut brown field mushrooms here. These are the biggest mushrooms that I've bought and then I've got some nice little shiitake mushrooms here and then various others. Just one of those simple selection packs, right. So they're the biggest so what we're going to do is we're going to cook those first. So I'm going to cut them into one centimeter slices, all right. Don't do them way for thin otherwise you don't know they're there. If we're going to cook them properly you want them to be meaty, okay. Like mushrooms, Carlos? Yeah, I'm not a massive fan. Not a massive fan. I will change that today. I don't mind them but I wouldn't choose to cook with them. Well that's all that's on offer today so it's that unless you've brought a packed lunch. No I haven't. So salt in the pan first which is unusual because what I want to do is sit the mushrooms on the salt. The salt will draw the moisture out and make the mushrooms meaty. Cooking mushrooms is a two-stage process. The first stage is get the water out of the mushroom and into the pan. The second stage is get the water out of the pan and it's all done through evaporation. So get your mushrooms in. There we go and then we'll hit it with a little bit of olive oil. That'll just help get the whole thing going. There you go. You can hear it now. Now we're cooking and let's do that. Let that salt draw the moisture out. You can't speed this up all right otherwise you just end up with like a mushroom creamy mushroom stew and what we're trying to get is a really beautiful meaty mushroomy herby sauce that's just going to coat that pasta. So with our wild mushrooms I've just got the shiitake mushrooms there which are quite a meaty one. Now if you can't get fresh wild mushrooms get dried and I'll show you them actually because I've got some in the cupboard. All right here's my dried wild mushrooms and I always have them in case I can't buy them okay and they are super meaty. I mean they smell incredible and they've completely dehydrated so you could use those instead of these. What you need to do is just pour boiling water over them, rehydrate them, sift the water away but keep it because it's like mushroom stock and then add it into your sauce later but we're good today. We've got fresh. So take our shiitakes. There we go. They can go to one side. They're not going in the pan yet and then we've got the smaller wild mushrooms. We're just going to break those off into individual mushrooms because they don't need chopping up. Those are a bit bigger so I'm just going to break that one in half and then do the same with that one as well and there we go. We've got our wild. They're all about the same size. Okay so let's have a little shake of this pan. Okay we're good. Right garlic. Let's get everything prepped up. So one garlic clove. Give it a little tap. I want this to be more about the mushrooms than garlic so only one clove today. Just chop it nice and fine and then chop it again. You could grate it straight in if you wanted to. No problem. Okay so that is ready. You can see I'm just sort of getting everything ready for the pan now. All right we've got some butter, got some parmesan, got a little bit of lemon juice. That's going to cut that nicely. So let's just have a little look. Let's grab a spoon. Let's turn these mushrooms over and see what that salt's done. You see how it's just starting to catch now. We're just, the mushrooms are going to give out the hydration in a minute and it's going to start to sort of seep into the pan and that sort of mushroom water basically. They're about half water mushrooms. There we go. Right I can add my garlic on the top. Now remember if you have any questions at all please do post them in the comments below. I'm here to help. I'm always happy to help whether it's about this recipe or whether it's about something else. Just post it in the comments and make sure if you like this program and you enjoy it share it with your friends and family. I would really appreciate that. We're trying to spread the word more, grow the audience. We're 125,000 at the moment and we'd like to grow it to a quarter of a million this year which is an ambitious goal but I like an ambitious goal. I like something to work towards and that's what we want to do. It's get more and more people watching our show and cooking our recipes okay. So now we're starting to smell seriously good in here. Garlic, mushrooms, olive oil. Nice. Right rosemary. Just going to strip it and just put it straight in okay. I'm not even going to chop the rosemary. Rosemary and thyme mushrooms absolutely love and there's there's one other herb as well that mushrooms really like in my opinion and that's tarragon. We're not using it today but if you like that whole mushroom tarragon creaminess go for that instead but I wanted to really accentuate the mushrooms and their meatiness which is why I've gone for rosemary and thyme. In we go. Now the thyme we're just going to strip that. Can you see this my hands on here Carlos? Yes. So I'm just going to use my fingernails and just sort of shred the thyme off the stalks okay. So I've got about a teaspoon worth there. I'm not going to chop that either. That's going straight in. There we go. All right let's have a little wipe. Right so you can see these field mushrooms. If I just use the back of my spoon look how much water's coming out. This is what we've got to get rid of okay before we introduce anything else. So let's just keep moving those mushrooms around. I'm just going to move them to one side and get the wild mushrooms in now. They inherently have more even more moisture than the field mushrooms as well. So get them in. Get a little drizzle of olive oil on those. Not too much. A little bit of salt on those wild mushrooms as well. There we go. Right they're going to cook nicely now. So let's talk crumb on the top. So I've got a piece of focaccia bread here. It's a sourdough focaccia. You could use any bread you want. Whatever's kind of past its best. So I'm just going to chop this up. I quite like chunks of bread on here. I don't like like tiny little crumbs because I want I want you to sort of get that crunchy bit on the top and then you dive into that sort of creamy rich mushroom bake. So I've gone sort of slightly chunkier here okay and then what we're going to do is we're going to grab one more clove of garlic and we're just going to build a really lovely crumb. So chop your garlic up, put it into your breadcrumbs. Let's get some thyme in with your breadcrumbs. Let's make the breadcrumbs the first part of the dish not just a thing that you put on top okay. It's the first layer of flavour that you're going to hit okay. So some fresh thyme in there and then what we need is a little olive oil onto the bread okay. Keep an eye on those mushrooms. See now we're starting to get a really nice bit of colour. Those mushrooms are giving up that moisture which is exactly what we want. Okay so I've got a really fine grater here so we're going to hit the crumbs with a bit of cheese. There we go and then just get your fingers in and just work all those flavours together and actually squeeze. Can you see my hands there Carlos? Yeah. Squeeze the oil into the bread yeah and work the thyme, work the oil and work the cheese in. So now I mean just try that Carlos. It's a bit of bread but like that is really good. Oh yeah. That is gonna be delish. So you've got parmesan in there, you've got thyme, you've got garlic, you've got nice olive oil and some great bread just chopped up. That is gonna now, that's gonna roast and go beautifully crunchy instead of just toasting on the top under the grill okay. Right I'm just gonna wash my hands. Okay so breadcrumbs just put those to one side they are ready to go. Now my pasta is pretty much cooked so I've got colander and jug there straight away okay. Let's give that pasta a little shake. So it's had nearly nine minutes not quite all right but that's okay because I know it's going back in the oven. So just pour it through and then I'll just pop that to one side. I'm gonna keep this pasta water okay and I'll show you why in a minute. Okay back to mushrooms, white wine, beefsteak. Our very good friends, I work with Beefsteak Club loads and my job is to create amazing recipes that work beautifully with their wines. They go off and find amazing wine, I create recipes, put the two together and you've got greatness in my opinion. So this is a chardonnay, this is coming out soon. This will be nice and dry and crisp so it's a nice wine to cut through the mushrooms. So let's crank the heat up okay you can see the mushrooms there. Now can you see, look at the bottom of that pan there Carlos, can you see that? It looks a bit burnt and a bit gnarly and a bit unpleasant. When I add this wine it's going to hit that, it's called deglazing. It's going to bubble up and all the flavour that's caramelising on there now is going to lift off the pan into the sauce. So it's really important that you do this hot okay, watch. So we've got about a glass of wine, give it a shake, get the mushrooms now into the wine okay. That all just looks good doesn't it Carlos, eh? Just looks nice. Now we want to boil that away. If you don't want to use alcohol, the alcohol will boil away so you're not actually consuming any but I totally get it. If you don't want it, you don't have it in the house, you don't want it, that's absolutely fine. Use a little bit of vegetable stock if you want to, that's absolutely fine. But you still want to find some liquid to deglaze that pan with because all that flavour will stay in the pan and you want that in your belly because it's all good flavours all right. Now if I shake my pan there look, you can see that a lot of it is clean now. Look how clean that pan is becoming. Yeah there's a little bit more to come there but all I have to do is boil that clean. So all that wine is just deglazing, the alcohol's evaporating, the flavour's just pushing into the mushrooms. We've got a little bit of double cream, you could use creme fraiche, you could use sour cream, whatever you prefer. I'm going to add a little bit of lemon zest for fragrance, not a lot because I want it fresh and fragrant. Here we go and then I'm going to squeeze a little bit of lemon juice in there as well because when we introduce butter and thyme and cream, it's all going to be quite rich. So 20 grams of butter in, that's now going to make it a little richer. Now these mushrooms, you could just serve these mushrooms on toast and they'd be blooming lovely wouldn't they? See I think you're coming around to the idea of mushrooms Carlos. Yeah I like you there. Right in with our cream okay, ready? Yep. Oh nice. If you didn't want to use cream you could make a nice thin bechamel white sauce, that's absolutely fine, no problem at all. Let's bring that up to the boil now, in with the last bit why not. Okay now remember the pasta water yeah, can you see this Carlos? Yes I do. Yeah that's gold, that's like liquid gold that stuff. It's full of starch, it's got a little bit of salt in it and that's what's going to help bring this sauce together. So one nice ladle full of pasta water is all this should need. You can always add a bit more if you want to but it'll be just fine. And then our rigatoni, so let me pass you that Carlos, that is al dente pasta. Do you see how because we've added salt to it it's actually got flavour hasn't it? Yeah absolutely. And it's got a little bit of bite, it's not the usual kind of soft pasta, it's got bite to it because it still wants to drink a bit of that and if you overcook this pasta it'll just break down in the oven once you have it, it needs that little bit longer to cook. There we go. I love rigatoni, I love the pasta. So now let's just stir this about, don't be afraid thinking oh that sauce is a bit thin, it's got all sit and soak like a nice Sunday evening bath where you're just like, that's what it's got to do. Switch the heat off, now I've got a grill on so the oven's on, it's on oven and grill okay. So what I'm going to do is a little bit of parmesan at the bottom because that's going to make it all like little kind of even more flavour yeah. There we go, give that a little shake. Now let's get our rigatoni, make sure you get all those lovely mushrooms, don't leave anything behind, leave no man behind. Make sure you get all that sauce, kind of, it doesn't want to just, it wants to almost protrude a little bit out of the pan. Pick a pan that's just maybe just slightly too small but think what would Pete use? I would use a pan that's a little bit too small, like that okay. Now let's get some parmesan, another layer yeah because I want to build a layer upon layer. So we've got a little parmesan at the bottom, we've got a little bit on the top and then we've got our amazing breadcrumbs. All right you ready for these Carlos? I am. Do you know what, whack them all on, don't mess about, whack it on. Now we've got this lovely garlicky, oily top, tiny bit more of the cheese. I would say this is not a Weight Watchers meal but you know what, it's going to be amazing, it's going to be so good this. There we go and I'm going to finish it. What I don't want is the top to dry out so we're going to add final drizzle of olive oil on there and then it's going in the oven under the grill until it's golden and bubbly. Might be five minutes, might be eight minutes, we'll wait and find out. This pasta bake smells and looks amazing, look at that. How good does that look? Now for me, just needs putting smack bang in the middle of the table and tucking in. It's creamy, it's rich, it's warming, it's crispy, it's crunchy, it's going to be absolutely amazing. Carlos you're going to have to wait for one second. Crunchy pasta. Let me get you a mushroom as well Carlos, seems you're not a fan and some breadcrumbs. Go for the full experience. There you go, try that, tell me what you think. Thank you. Now if you want the recipe it's going to be in my new book Peter Sidwell's Kitchen which is going to be available in the summer so if you're interested and you want a copy of the book, type new book in the comments and it'll launch into Facebook messenger and that'll kind of take you over to our website where you can pre-order if you want to, where we do signed copies, personalised, you name it. But Carlos will have put the ingredients list down the side here as well so that you can grab the ingredients list and then you just need to watch how I've made it and copy it but do it. It's such an amazing dish, it is absolutely delicious, vegetarian, full of flavour, you're going to love it.