Sautéed Porcini Mushrooms for a Crowd

This Sautéed Porcini Mushrooms recipe is a great side dish for a crowd. Serve it for the holidays or any other time your friends and family gather for a meal. Excellent with a bold red wine. 

Earlier this fall, we gathered with some food and wine loving friends to celebrate Lori and Ray retiring after a wonderful run with their shop, Pairings Wine & Food.

Lori and Ray gave a fun challenge to our wine club group for their final wine pairing as the store owners. Each of us was assigned a group of wines and ask to come up with a food pairing for it. I’ll have to break down the full menu soon, but first wanted to share our sautéed porcini mushrooms recipe. These savory mushrooms could possibly be served on the Thanksgiving table!

We were matched with a set of big red wines–a Napa Cab, a wonderful Brunello and an elegant Montepulciano. Marcia and Marvin were working with the same group of wines, and quickly chimed in that they would make meatloaf…which was delicious, and I adapted this quick meatloaf recipe to go with an Italian red wine from Pietra Pinta.

There were already mashed potatoes coming with the meatloaf, so I thought some sauteed porcini mushrooms would complement the meat and go with the red wines. I find the earthy flavor of mushrooms to be a pretty good companion for red wine!

Making Sautéed Porcini Mushrooms for a Crowd

The first trick to making sautéed porcini mushrooms for a crowd is to supplement the porcini with some basic button mushrooms to stretch the dish for more people while managing the costs.

The recipe uses dried porcini mushrooms. So the first step for the recipe is to reconstitute the porcini in some hot water.

The reserved liquid from soaking the porcini mushrooms can be used as stock in recipes such this Chicken and Mushroom Risotto recipe.

I was making these porcini mushrooms for a group of about 12. When I began cooking the dish, there certainly seemed to be plenty of mushrooms for everyone. But mushrooms do cook down significantly, so the quantity given is more suited for 8 or so people, in order to give each person a good scoop of the sautéed porcini mushrooms. You can easily scale up the recipe if needed. Fortunately there was plenty of other food to enjoy the night I made this porcini recipe!

Note that cooking this amount of mushrooms takes about 10 minutes longer than my typical mushroom sauce recipe.

We finish our recipe with some truffle butter to give extra depth of flavor. You could use regular butter along with truffle oil or truffle salt if you have it, or simply regular butter if you don’t have any form of truffle in the house. But that would be kind of sad. 🙁

As suspected, the sautéed porcini mushrooms were great alongside the meatloaf and potatoes, and paired well with the bold red wines.

Keep this recipe in mind for a holiday feast or other gathering with friends and family!

Sautéed Porcini Mushrooms for a Crowd

A big batch of porcini mushrooms makes a flavorful side dish for the holidays or any other time you are gathering with family and friends for dinner.

• Author: Cooking Chat
• Prep Time: 30 mins
• Cook Time: 30 mins
• Total Time: 1 hour
• Yield: 8 servings 1x
• Category: side dish
• Method: Sauté
• Cuisine: Italian

Scale 1x2x3x

Ingredients

• 2 ozs dried porcini mushrooms
• 3 cups hot water
• 1/2 cup chopped shallots
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 16 ozs button mushrooms
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 1/2 tsp dried sage
• generous pinch of sea salt — Tuscan sea salt if possible
• 1/2 cup of dry red wine
• 1 tbsp truffle butter
• black pepper to taste
• grated cheese for topping (optional)

Instructions

1. Heat the water in a pan. When it starts to boil, remove from stove and pour over the dried porcini in a bowl that can withstand the hot water. Let the porcini soak in the water for at least 30 minutes.
2. Place a sieve over a bowl and line it with a wet paper towel. Pour the mushrooms into the sieve. Reserve the porcini soaking water for another use. Rinse the mushrooms, then coarsely chop and set aside.
3. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet on medium heat. Add the shallots, cook for a few minutes until they begin to soften. Add the garlic, and cook for another minute.
4. Stir the about half of the button mushrooms into the skillet, along with the pinch of salt, and give them a couple of minutes to start cooking down. Add the rest of the button mushrooms.
5. Cook the button mushrooms on medium low heat for about 10 minutes, until they start to soften and “sweat”. Add the porcini mushrooms along with the sage and thyme. Cook for another 3 minutes, then add the red wine.
6. Cook the mushrooms until the red wine is mostly absorbed, about 5 minutes. Finish the dish by stirring in the truffle butter and adding black pepper and salt to taste. Serve immediately or cover to and keep warm until it is time to eat. Serve topped with optional grated cheese if desired.

Notes

• This recipe provides a pretty good serving for 8 people or a small portion for 12. You could scale it up for a larger group by doubling the recipe. You could also just increase the porcini portion if you like.
• The reserved liquid from soaking the porcini mushrooms can be used as stock in recipes such this Chicken and Mushroom Risotto recipe.

Keywords: porcini mushrooms, side dish, sautéed porcini

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