Autumn produce: Puffball

Puffballs are fat fungi. Really morbidly huge. The swollen spheres range in size from golf ball to beach ball, and you can often spot them in late summer nestling unwanted in lawns with uptight gardeners tutting neurotically over their prone forms. When they mature, they turn into teeny spore bombs, liable any second to explode their contents all over your shoe in a highly inedible (though exciting) manner.

But before then, in the first flush of their youth, there are what seems like a couple of precious seconds where they're just like most other mushrooms: savoury and delicious.

 

Anyone for a game of spot the puffball … ?

This is my first time on puffballs (I've moved on from gateway mushrooms) - and lucky for me, the market had some monsters in stock. The biggest was football-sized, but you can buy it by the slice, so I invested in a hefty hunk.

Even before cooking, it's lovely. Just nuzzle up to it and it smells like woods, and truffles, and compost, and cream.

And god, but it looks beautiful. The massive slab of chunky mushroom is pure, dense cream all the way through. It cuts like silk into slices like pieces of heaven - there's something very zen about the meaty, snowy pieces against the shiny black of the frying pan.

I went for an olive oil/butter mix, and although I left out garlic so I could taste it better, I added some little strips of black forest ham. During cooking, it becomes clear that even for a mushroom, it's extremely spongy - the slices soaked up the fat instantly, and if I'd have given it more, it would have taken a whole bottle.

The mushroom smells terrific, but at first taste, the flesh is oddly bland. Oh it's juicy, with a delicate balance of savoury and a surprising sweet not, a little like a wood blewit. It's earthy and autumnal. But it's more a texture thing - the ultra-sponged flesh seems to clot on chewing like wet blotting paper.

Maybe it's those little brown gills that contain most of the taste after all, and this ball is pure white. Still, it's a mushroom and it's tasty. Next time, though, I'd stop messin' about and just get something with gills on. Mackerel, anyone?

Comments

[Terentia]

Point me to those lawns with giant puffballs! I found two puffballs years ago in Yorkshire and I remember them as the most delicious thing I've ever tasted. Every autumn since has brought disappointment as I have failed to find any that are edible. Perhaps, though, the memory is better than the reality....