A watercolour of a pool of soft pale yellow polenta topped with dark browned mushrooms
Generated with OpenAI gpt-image-1
Adapted from Polenta e funghi

Polenta with mushrooms and garlic

An established dish converted to shelf-stable ingredients. Every substitution is documented below.

How long it keeps

About 6 months, set by Polenta (instant).

Indicative, for planning a build before you buy. The answer for a pack you already own is the best before date printed on it, and that only holds if it has been stored as the label says.

Serves
3
Burners
1
Pans
1
Water
1.1 L
Active
15 min
Total
30 min

Ingredients

Two kinds of mushroom doing two different jobs: the dried ones for flavour, which they have and the tinned ones do not, and the tinned ones for texture and something to actually brown.

  1. Dried mushrooms covered with 800 ml just-boiled water, 15 minutes. Lift, squeeze, slice. Keep the liquid, minus the gritty base.
  2. Drain the tinned mushrooms and dry them hard: wet mushrooms steam grey instead of browning.
  3. Hot pan, oil, tinned mushrooms in one layer, three minutes untouched. Turn, two more. Add the sliced dried ones, garlic and herbs for thirty seconds. Tip the lot into a bowl.
  4. Mushroom liquid into the pan with the salt, brought to the boil. Rain the polenta in with one hand while stirring hard with the other, all at once and it lumps irreversibly.
  5. Five minutes stirring until it drops from the spoon in a thick ribbon.
  6. Polenta into bowls, mushrooms over, plenty of pepper and a thread of oil.

Serves 3.

What this was adapted from

Polenta e funghi: the northern Italian plate of soft polenta under a mushroom sauté

  • fresh porcini or mixed wild mushrooms → dried mushrooms rehydrated, plus tinned mushrooms fried hard

    Wild mushrooms are the point of the original. Dried ones give the deep flavour and tinned ones give the bulk and something to brown, which between them covers most of what the fresh would have done. The soaking liquid goes into the polenta rather than being wasted.

  • butter and parmesan stirred into the polenta → olive oil and the mushroom liquid

    Neither keeps. The mushroom soaking liquid cooked into the polenta replaces the savoury depth of the cheese, and olive oil the richness of the butter.