Return of the Giant Puffball

Last year about this time, when taking some compost to the pile in the back corner of our lot, I noticed what looked like a 16-inch softball thrown over the fence.  On closer inspection, though, it was a mycological growth of some sort.  Some research on the internet and looking through our mushroom hunter's handbook, we were pretty sure it was a Giant Puffball.  We peeled it, cut it up into pieces, and sauteed it, and it was pretty tasty!
So naturally, this year we have been keeping our eye out for the return of the puffball, with no luck until yesterday, when R found this beauty in the back, beneath the maple trees and the burning bush.  A week ago, there had been NOTHING there.

Last year's model had not yet split its top, and was more spherical.  This baby weighs about 1 pound and 4 ounces.  We decided to turn half of it into mushroom soup and the other half into breaded puffball slices.  Our own hundred-yard found dinner.
For the preparation, it is necessary first to peel the puffball.  This is pretty easy where the skin is thick, toward to bottom of the ball, and it peels away by hand.

At this point, a paring knife can finish the job. (The little black knobby thing on its left is the point of attachment to the earth.)
Once peeled, you can cut it up any old way.  It has the texture and feel of styrofoam, which is pretty weird.  (Maybe that's where the chemists got their idea.)
First we sliced the ends, which would go into the soup.

Our soup would be Julia Child's cream of mushroom soup, from Mastering, volume 1.  We know it well and it's delicious, so using the puffball in this way would provide a controlled experiment.  We sautéed some minced onion in butter, then added flour (equal amount to the flour), and cooked the roux for a couple of minutes, then added boiling chicken stock, and once smooth, added the mushroom pieces, some thyme, bay leaf, and parsley, to simmer for about 20 minutes.

They do float, just like chunks of styrofoam (or tofu?).  Meanwhile, we sliced the rest of the reserved pieces into thin slices, as we would the mushroom caps in the original recipe.  These we sauteed, covered, in some butter.  Puffballs, it seems, are more like eggplants - they really absorb the butter and we needed to add quite a lot more.

Eventually, they cooked down. We strained the stock, added the mushroom pieces, made a mixture of cream and egg yolk, and poured some of the stock into that, then the whole thing back in the pot and simmered a little more.

Then we served in soup plates.

The flavor is definitely and delicately mushroom; the texture of the mushroom pieces not as dense as with champignons.  But very delicious indeed.

For our main course, we decided to take 3/4-inch slices of puffball, and bread them using egg and panko.

Now the slices look like some bad industrial cheese as well as styrofoam.  In order to fit them better into our big sauté pan, we decided to cut them into half moons.  Here they are, breaded, and ready for the pan.  The yellow, of course, comes from those free-range eggs from the Moore Family Farm, with their colorful diet of insects.

We sautéed them in a mixture of peanut oil and butter, and kept adding more butter.  As they cook, the puffball inside gets softer and sags a little.  Because of the breading, you can't cook it too fast or too long, so our last year's effort produced more tender cooked mushrooms.  This method adds the crunch of the breading.  They looked and cooked a little like French toast.

Inside the cooked cutlet, you can still see the styrofoam effect:

Or does it look like chicken fillet?

We served our puffball cutlets with beet greens braised with sautéed pancetta, garlic, and diced red onion. We had gotten two bunches of beets from Bracken's Farm at our farmer's market:  the greens were especially fresh and gorgeous looking.  In the morning, we roasted the beetroot, and reserved the greens for dinner.  Here we followed a method from the Chez Panisse vegetable cookbook (who use dried currants instead of pancetta), separating the leaves from the stems, chopping the stems into 1-inch pieces, and the leaves into a chiffonade.  We added the greens to the sauteed pancetta, and cooked covered until tender.  We finished with a little balsamic vinegar.  I would say that I preferred last year's method for the puffball, with parsley and garlic.  You might add some new potatoes, too.  But the cutlets went well with the delicious greens.

During the earlier part of the day, we made another batch of tomato sauce.  The plum tomatoes from Blue Moon Farm have been fabulous this year:  deep red and meaty.  We've been buying 4-8 pounds a week and making various sauces:  mostly Marcella Hazan's Tomato Sauce I from her first cookbook, but also Patricia Wells's rustic roasted tomato sauce from her Vegetables book (tomatoes, oregano, salt - nothing more - roasted until soft and then pureed in the food processor).  This week we tried the roasted tomato sauce from the Chez Panisse Vegetable cookbook, which is about half tomatoes, and half sliced onions, leeks, carrots, and garlic, along with some olive oil.

Here is our freezer ready for winter!

(That's last Christmas's squash soup on the top right in the big container next to two containers of yellow tomato sauce [Hazan I], brandade on the middle left, and swiss chard risotto on the bottom right on top of the Russkii Standart vodka bottle.  The rest is pretty much tomatoes and nothing but.)