It’s white-truffle season, which means the city’s well-to-do foodies are frenetically ordering the Italian delicacy on all sorts of meats and pastas. We believe all mushrooms are created equal, though, and thanks to farms and imports most are available year-round from all over the world.
“There’s such a wide variety around,” says Sisha Ortuzar, the chef and co-owner of Tom Colicchio’s new spot, Riverpark, where a rich broth of mushroom consommé is featured on the menu. “You can go from subtle and soft like button and enoki, to funky and strong like chanterelle and maitake.” Inspired by French onion soup, Ortuzar’s broth of hen of the woods, chanterelle and black trumpet mushrooms is “rich and satisfying for the cold-weather months,” he says.
We asked Hans Johansson, owner of Mushrooms & More, a business that has been supplying the city’s top restaurants with fungi for 27 years, and Ariane Daguin, owner of high-end meat and produce supplier D’Artagnan, to weigh in on popular varieties of our favorite ’shrooms.