Mushroom Ragu and Summer BLTs
Adventures in Pennsylvania foraging, pasta talk, lady locks, plus two Summer BLTs in L.A. that you need to try.
Hi! You’re here, wow! Actually, I heard you come in but I wanted to act surprised. Those exclamation points were more for you than they were for me.
My whole body hurts because I just wrapped up selling pasta all day yesterday. Boy, did my ass get slammed. Hold on, it’s too damn early, let me rephrase that: Boy, did I get slammed in the ass.
31 orders. I’m always thrilled to sell homemade pasta to people; I still feel like I’m buzzing. Of all the things that I’ve done for money—writing, stand-up, acting, videos, shitty manual labor jobs—pasta makes me feel the most human.
Strangely enough, a fan of my old podcast, The Macaroni Zone with James Austin Johnson, ordered pasta yesterday. Blew my mind. I bet 200 people listened to that podcast weekly, and that’s being generous. I suspect more discovered it once James got SNL, though.
Anyway, the pasta in Pittsburgh is vegan and it’s every Sunday at Sia’s Garden Grown in East Liberty, Pittsburgh. Stop by. Also…
Hey! Before we get into foraging mushrooms and ragu specifics, subscribe will ya?
One of the pasta dishes I ran yesterday was a mushroom ragu made with chicken of the woods. I will admit that it’s probably not very cool or technically very legal for me to just sell people mushrooms that I find in the woods; I’m not licensed to do so. However, my cousin Andy is a skilled forager with at least a decade of experience. He has taught many classes on the subject as well. Though I also know what I’m doing out there in the wilderness, I don’t cook anything without talking to Andy first. I’m a responsible rascal, and always have been.
So no, the ragu pictured above wasn’t legal but in my mind it was completely ethical. Who gives a shit about laws, anyway? Stop being hall monitors you absolute dorks.
Andy and I found a giant, nearly 10 lb. load of chicken of the woods in Gaston Park, a small, dilapidated park in New Castle, Pennsylvania. You may have heard of hen of the woods (AKA maitake mushrooms), but chicken of the woods is much different. COTW (we’re abbreviating now) are colorfully orange and yellow like the sunset. When you get up close, it’ll strike you with its radiant beauty. HOTW are conversely gray, and their flavor is that of a high quality mushroom. Meaty, peppery, and earthy are all flavor descriptors people often use to describe HOTW.
Chicken, meanwhile, has a very distinctive flavor that’s not at all like a mushroom. It reads very much like an alternative meat. It’s got the texture of seitan or even tofu. The real reason people love it, though, is that the flavor is deeply savory and clean. People sometimes think it tastes like crab or lobster. Yeah, it’s like that. It doesn’t have that earthiness or that distinct mushroom squish.
Anyway, we found this giant-ass mushroom and holy shit look at it again.
Now I make mushroom ragu the same way I make any ragu—a diced soffritto base of carrot, celery, onion, and garlic sautéed with a few choice herbs like rosemary, oregano, and parsley. Then San Marzano tomatoes and finish with butter.
If given the option to include meat, ooh wee, I would render off some guanciale, then finish this bad boy with some cream and butter. Go fully indulgent. Every mushroom ragu is better with guanciale and cream.
Didn’t have that luxury at Sia’s, though. Here’s a quick recipe for the mushroom ragu if you A) are vegan and B) hunt mushrooms. Very few of you, I’m sure.
Vegan Chicken of The Woods Ragu
2-2/12 lbs. chicken of the woods, cleaned
1 large onion, diced
3 medium carrots, diced
3 celery, diced
16 cloves garlic, diced
3 ounces of rosemary, parsley, and oregano, diced
2 cans San Marzano tomatoes, blended in a food processor until smooth
An ass load of olive oil
In a large dutch oven on medium heat, sear off the COTW with olive oil in batches. Put enough olive oil down to coat the pan generously. Place the mushrooms in, season with salt and pepper, and cook for 2-3 minutes on each side. They should have crispy edges, and look slightly browned but not burnt. Set aside in a big bowl.
In your now clean dutch oven, use a few more tablespoons of olive oil and cook the garlic, onion, and herbs together until translucent and fragrant. About 3 minutes.
Add the carrots, a bit more olive oil, some salt, and cook for two minutes. Now add the celery. Another 2 minutes. Stir everything and cook together for another minute or two, until everything is soft and smells wonderful.
Dice the cooled, cooked filets of COTW, and add to the pot. Now add the two cans of San Marzano tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper. Cook on medium to low heat for 2-2 1/2 hours. Finish with vegan butter or cashew cream (what we did at the restaurant). This serves 10-12 people, so cut it in half if need be.
Get to Know Lady Locks
I spent yesterday morning in the Strip District of Pittsburgh, a wonderful section of the city full of wholesale produce, butchers, delis, bars, restaurants, street food, and coffee shops.
There, I stopped briefly at La Prima Espresso Company for an Americano. La Prima is a great place to watch old Italian men stand around and talk loudly, if you’re into that sort of thing. I sure as hell am. What are they always so hot about? I’ll never know, but I’m fascinated by the wild gestures. This particular morning was bustling with Pittsburgh Italians.
Next to La Prima is Colangelo’s, a pasta and pizza slice joint that also sells baked goods. The lady locks in the display case are some of my favorite that I’ve ever had. For the uninitiated, lady locks are a cannoli-adjacent, cream filled pastry. In other places they’re known as cream horns and clothespins, which I think we can all agree are shitty names for cookies. Check out this online recipe that wants you to bake Mom’s Cream Horns. Jesus Christ. I don’t even know your Mom!
In Pittsburgh, they’re rightfully called lady locks. That’s because wedding cookie tables are a defiant Pittsburgh tradition. It’s an institution that started because Eastern European immigrants decided to opt out of the expensive wedding cake entirely. In lieu of cake, families would instead bake cookies. Dozens of varieties of cookies that can number in the thousands, all elegantly spread out to look like a royal celebration. The wedding cookie table has since taken on a life of its own. There’s some really lavash ones out there that are stunning.
The Move for newly weds to be: Ditch the wedding cake, and get yourself a cookie table. Your guests will thank you.
The lady locks at Colangelo’s are divine. A deliciously flaky pastry tube stuffed with creamy, sugary filling. That cream filling has the texture and taste of whipped butter. It’s awesome. The perfect Sunday morning breakfast. One lady lock costs $3.25. It’s worth it.
Also, I saw this outside of a church in the Strip and I couldn’t stop laughing:
Going forward, I will be using “Feast of Assumption” as a dramatic turn of phrase when I’m losing an argument. Here, I’ll demonstrate.
You: Danny, did you just try to walk through that screen door? I heard a loud sound and then you said, “shit” and now the screen door is broken.
Me: This is a feast of assumption and I simply won’t stand for it.
Anyway if you’re attending the Feast of Assumption tomorrow you are way too fucking Catholic. Pick up a hobby like bird watching or something.
Two Great BLTs in Los Angeles
It’s tomato season, and you should celebrate by getting two awesome BLTs at Bub & Grandma’s and Friends & Family. A big newsletter for the & symbol this week.
Friends & Family is a great little lunch spot just a few blocks away from my apartment in Thai Town. It’s a bakery and restaurant, and their hours reflect that (open from 8AM-2PM everyday and 3PM on weekends). They have a great little breakfast menu with simple yet elegant meals like olive oil fried eggs ($14) that comes served with harissa, chick peas, olives, and toasted bread. Olive oil basted eggs are my favorite way to cook eggs, despite the unfounded claim that butter is better.
Their BELT (bacon, egg, lettuce, and tomato), is thick, delicious, and comes with a well-dressed side salad that’s both refreshing and tasty. It costs $16.
The bread is toasted sourdough, and when I say toasted, I mean the edges are crispy. I’m guessing they used a broiler. The mayo is standard, and the tomatoes are market fresh and salted well (I wouldn’t endorse any BLT that doesn’t feature salted tomato slices). The tomatoes aren’t anything spectacular like a farm fresh heirloom or beefsteak, but they get the job done.
However, the BLT at Friends & Family is a success because it has excellent, in-house bread and thick cut, crispy bacon. I also like that one half of the sandwich has egg and the other does not. A full fried egg on a sandwich always leaves one half without much yolk anyway. F&F, instead, just embraces that an egg is only good on one half anyways. Their BLT feels like two sandwiches, in that way. One is yolky and luxurious, while the other is just a classic, well-made BLT.
The side salad is also dope. It’s butter lettuce, translucent radishes, salt, pepper, olive oil and vinegar. Simple, seasoned, and totally refreshing. More side salads with sandwiches and omelets please. It’s a small offering that goes a long way with any meal.
This is also going to sound weird as hell, but I really enjoy how Friends & Family serves their water. Check out this sturdy, stocky metal cup that looks like it was made from WWII shrapnel.
The benefit here is that the water always stays cool. Metal cups. Nobody does this. Every restaurant alive has these thin, stupid, small plastic cups. They’re so flimsy that you feel like you’re drinking the plastic itself. F&F rightfully understands that this is a load of horseshit. It gets real hot in Los Angeles. I appreciated the cold water and metal cup combo almost as much as the BLT itself.
Friends & Family is Great, But Bub & Grandma’s BLT is Better For One Simple Reason
Better tomato. The tomatoes at Bub & Grandma’s are spectacular; on par with the stuff you get early in the morning at a farmer’s market during peak tomato season. They are sweet and meaty, with just enough acid that you recognize it’s a tomato. These miscellaneous chunks of light orange, dark green, and blood red tomatoes are low in acid but high in flavor. A not-so gentle reminder that tomatoes are indeed a fruit.
They’re also perfectly salted, and the sandwich itself is so dang balanced that I can actually taste the freshly cracked black pepper. This sandwich is peppery, ya’ll. Not in an overpowering way, but just that delightfully earthy, spicy flavor that properly puncuates every component of a BLT. Pepper: It’s the unsung hero of a great sandwich.
My only issue with Bub’s BLT is that the sandwich’s innards slip-side around. The tomatoes are cut coarsely, not in thick slices, so spillage is an issue. The way Bub and Grandma’s uses iceberg lettuce is legendary (peep their tuna salad sandwich), and here you can see it fray outward from the sandwich’s ends. It’s a little messier than I want, but it succeeds in every other way that a BLT should: Good bread, great bacon, spectacular tomatoes, lemony mayo, cool, crunchy lettuce, and the correct amount of salt + pepper.
Man, typing that out, I don’t want Summer to end.
Thank you for reading The Move! I’m having a lot of fun doing this, and I hope you’re following along as I write food recommendations across this whole damn country. I technically don’t have a home at the moment, but you can expect continuing coverage in Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and more!
I’ve never really aspired to cover one specific food scene. I like to think of the world as my own personal hoagie to be devoured messily. Lettuce on my pants, that sort of thing.
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