Tony Mantuano had billed it as an excursion into the hinterlands of southern Wisconsin to forage for wild mushrooms, wild watercress and wild asparagus. But the sky threatened rain and the temperature was dropping into the 30s as we drove north in his Dodge 4-by-4 in early May. Doubt loomed as heavy as the clouds.
Mantuano, who is chef/owner of Tuttaposto restaurant in Chicago and Mangia Trattoria in Kenosha, said his mission was to collect some native Wisconsin foods for a monthly “friendship dinner” at Tuttaposto for patrons interested in various kinds of cooking and foods.
The menu already had been printed and it featured Lake Michigan smelt, Wisconsin brook trout with fiddlehead ferns and ramps, spaghetti with morel mushrooms, roast peppercorn duck breast with spicy wild watercress, Wisconsin goat cheese torte with Wisconsin cherries plus a selection of wines from Wollersheim Winery in Prairie du Sac.
He knew where watercress clogged the shallows of streams and asparagus shot up along the road, he said. The chance of finding fiddlehead ferns and ramps (wild leeks) was probably remote, but mushrooms were even trickier, so he pulled the truck into Red Valley Ranch in Slades Corners, not far from Lake Geneva, for some advice.
When we arrived, Eric Rose, the only commercial mushroom farmer in Wisconsin, was bulldozing several hundred cubic yards of fragrant compost into a large shed to replenish some of his growing beds.
“I’d take you out to where there’s quite a few morels,” he said, “but with this weather they won’t be out for another week, maybe two.” Morels are tasty, honeycomb-topped, conical mushrooms. Difficult to cultivate, most are obtained from foragers who know where to find them growing wild.
Instead, Rose gave us a tour of his facilities. He raises white button mushrooms-the common ones you find in the supermarket-plus brown, thumb-size creminis and plate-shaped portabellas, which are just more mature creminis, he said.
Rose’s beds are 8-inch deep steel boxes about 6 feet wide and 60 feet long stacked three high in three rows in dark Quonset huts that lead off the main shed. Compost is the growing medium, and Rose makes his from manure, old straw, cocoa bean shells and a few secret ingredients. This earthy mix takes a few weeks to ferment into a rich nutritive base.
To get to the mushrooms, it was necessary to walk quite close to a steaming heap of fresh compost, which left no doubt we were on a farm.
“I look for the odor of yeast to know when it is ready,” Rose said. To do that you need a particular kind of nose, Mantuano acknowledged, holding his.
Inside the hut, where the temperature remains between 66 and 68 degrees, fresh compost beds are sprayed with mushroom spores that Rose buys from a laboratory. It takes the mushrooms about seven weeks to show, and they can be harvested for about four weeks thereafter as they approach golf-ball size.
Mushrooms grow in spurts called flushes, Rose said, and his beds yield up to 2 1/2 pounds per square foot for each growing period. Portabellas take longer because they are larger.
That gave chef Mantuano, who uses about 100 pounds of portabellas a week between his two restaurants, a chance to discuss a new idea:
“People really love portabellas roasted, but I’d like to try roasting large white mushrooms if you could grow them for me,” he told Rose. Mantuano thinks the texture of the white mushroom might be sturdier for roasting than the portabellas. Reluctantly, Rose acknowledged he could grow larger whites, but said demand for portabellas was not too great and they took longer to grow. Mantuano assured him that consumers were just starting to learn to cook portabellas and that demand would “mushroom, excuse the pun.” A deal, however, still has not been worked out.
Proud of his operation, Rose said that he starts with raw material that is mostly by-products and waste-manure, used straw and shells-and produces a popular, flavorful product. He recycles the spent compost for green plants. It is an ecologically sound system, said Rose, who has been farming mushrooms since the early 1970s. Except for his farm store on Wisconsin Highway 50, he sells most of his production to restaurants.
Does he ever pipe in music for mushrooms? Does he ever talk to them?
“No, but they talk to me,” he said. “They laugh at me sometimes. Like when we plan to pick a large harvest just before Easter or Christmas when the demand is high. Mushrooms know that, so they wait until the day after to come up.”
Chasing rainbows
It was looking as if Mantuano would be buying his morels, but what about the watercress and asparagus? The truck radio announced that it was snowing up in Waukesha, where he planned to look.
“Great,” he said, “but I want to stop by my trout man on the way.” The trout man is Bill Johnson, who runs Rushing Waters Trout Farm Inc. in Palmyra on Highway H.
The artesian wells on Johnson’s farm, in the heart of the Kettle Moraine district, feed directly into his breeding tanks and ponds. Each hour 3,000 gallons of fresh water pour in from an aquifer several hundred feet underground.
Thus his rainbow trout-from the time they are hatched to the time they are netted and cleaned-live in what tests show is some of the freshest and most pollution-free water on earth. They are raised only on a commercially prepared feed of corn, soybean by-products and fish. It takes about 1.2 pounds of feed to raise a pound of fish, which is a pretty good return, he said, compared to cattle which take 9 to 10 pounds.
Johnson’s trout swim in several dozen pools and are threatened by little more than migrating blue heron and osprey who regard Rushing Waters as a roadside Wendy’s.
Nets help to keep the predators out, but “we still found 3,000 fish last year on the banks,” Johnson said, “and those were the ones the birds dropped.”
The fish farm has been at the site for more than 60 years, and Johnson has owned it for the last seven. The largest operation of its kind in the state, Rushing Waters harvests 600 to 1,200 pounds a day, most of which Johnson sends to restaurants in Milwaukee, Madison and Chicago.
Breeding takes place in seven large concrete tanks from hand selected breeding stock. “I have about a 90 percent survival rate,” he said. In the wild, survival probably is less than 10 percent. So far he only raises rainbows, but he plans to experiment with Arctic char and perhaps salmon.
As a cold rain began, he lead Mantuano around the farm, saying “Trout are some of the most sensitive fish. One of my workers closed off a pool one day so the water didn’t circulate. I lost 1,000 fish.
“Trout are the canaries in the mine: If there is anything wrong, they are first to show it. I can almost tell by looking at the way they are swimming if anything is wrong.”
Like mushroom farmer Rose, Johnson takes pride in the way his farm operates within the ecosystem.
“We are blessed here in Kettle Moraine. The water comes in clean and when it leaves it is still clean enough to drink. These fish never mix with other fish, and even their leavings are pumped out and used as fertilizer,” he said.
As an added attraction Johnson showed the chef a large patch of wild watercress, then waded into the cold stream to grasp a sample. “Try this,” he said. “It has a real peppery flavor. We’ve got three different kinds around here. You can have all you want. It grows like a weed.”
Even though the rain had increased and the temperature had dropped, Mantuano was glad to have finally found at least some of what he set out for.
“It’s too bad,” Johnson said as an afterthought. “The asparagus should be coming up soon. You should come back in about a week, maybe two. There’ll be lots of morels to pick too.”
A few days later, as guests sat down in Tuttaposto for the foraging dinner, Mantuano said that a good restaurant in Italy would use foods that were locally available.
A few days after our trip he had been able to get some wild watercress and ramps from near Waukesha. He also obtained Wisconsin smelt, trout, duck, goat cheese and cherries. But Mantuano had to rely on specialty vegetable purveyor Tom Cornille to scare up the morels and fiddlehead ferns from other parts of the country.
“I was a week early, I guess,” Mantuano said. “The mushrooms must have heard me coming.”
Two simple but delicious dishes featured at the Wisconsin foraging dinner at Tuttaposto, which was prepared by David Reynoso, chief chef at Mangia Restaurant in Kenosha, were crispy smelt with lemon and spaghetti with morel mushrooms. Here are Tony Mantuano’s recipes.
CRISPY SMELT WITH LEMON
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Marinating time: Overnight
Cooking time: 15 minutes
Yield: 4 servings
Lake Michigan smelt are popular during this season. The small fish need little if any boning.
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon each: hot red pepper sauce, Worcestershire sauce
1 pound cleaned smelt, rinsed, patted dry
1/2 cup each: flour, cornmeal
Salt, freshly ground pepper to taste
Peanut oil for pan- or deep-frying
1 lemon, cut into 8 wedges, for garnish
1. Mix lemon juice, hot pepper sauce and Worcestershire sauce in a plastic, glass or stainless steel container. Add smelt; refrigerate overnight.
2. Mix flour, cornmeal, salt and pepper in a pie plate. Drain smelt thoroughly and coat each fish evenly with flour mixture, shaking off the excess.
3. Heat peanut oil in heavy pan or deep-fryer to 335 degrees. Fry the fish in small batches until crisp, 7 to 8 minutes. Drain on paper toweling. Serve with lemon wedges.
SPAGHETTI WITH MOREL MUSHROOMS
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes
Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Morels and freshly grated Romano cheese are essential to the taste of this recipe. Other mushrooms may be substituted but the flavor will be different.
1 pound spaghetti
8 ounces fresh morel mushrooms, halved
1/4 cup olive oil
1 cup each, finely diced: zucchini, onions
2 tablespoons minced garlic
1 cup veal stock or chicken broth
1 tablespoon each, chopped: fresh sage leaves, rosemary, flat-leaf parsley
1/2 cup freshly grated Romano cheese
1 large tomato, seeded, diced
Salt, freshly ground pepper to taste
1. Cook pasta in large pot of boiling water according to package directions until al dente. Drain and reserve.
2. Meanwhile, plunge morels into a pot of boiling water 30 to 60 seconds. Rinse immediately in cold water.
3. Heat oil in a medium saucepan. Add mushrooms, zucchini, onions and garlic and cook over high heat 6 to 7 minutes. Add broth and herbs; reduce heat and and simmer 5 minutes more.
4. Add cooked pasta and simmer 2 to 3 minutes, then add cheese, tomato salt and pepper. Take off heat and serve immediately.
