A walk in the garden - Looking at the fourth course of my pop-up restaurant

I love the idea for this course, it’s so simple and yet it produced an incredible dish. Now, this dish had 2 flavours, mushroom and parmesan. For the parmesan side, I had a buttermilk biscuit and some parmesan-basil leaves, and for the mushroom side, I had 5 types of mushrooms done in different ways.

Before I start, I must apologise for having to use a different picture to show the gravy. Unfortunately, none of the pictures taken that night shows the gravy itself, or the incredibly cool jug we served it in, so I had to pull up a picture from a while ago.

I'm going to start with the one big problem...the biscuit. I overdid the parmesan in the dough, so it ended up being too salty. Originally, these biscuits don’t actually have parmesan. But where’s the fun in that? So I make my biscuits with a bit of grated parmesan as well, so that they also have the flavour. But it’s easy to get carried away with how much you’re putting in, and that’s what happened here. I still 100% recommend adding parmesan to the biscuit, but I would also suggest that you keep it in check to not make it overtly salty.

The parmesan leaves were really simple, they're literally made by mixing grated parmesan with basil puree and then putting it in the oven until it becomes a deep green.

Now on to the mushrooms. First is the mushroom stew. I can say without embarrassment that I have failed to make this well in the past because I legitimately forgot to add salt, which made it horrible. Also, add a good amount of pepper, and if you add too much, I have a quick trick that saved me on the pop-up night. I ended up adding too much fresh pepper, but the simplest way to neutralise it is by adding cream or milk, preferably cream to keep the thickness. I added a nice dollop of heavy cream, and I could no longer tell that there was too much pepper.

For the mushrooms, I had 5 types - Button, oyster, king oyster, enoki and dried porcini. 

The dried porcini was used in the mushroom broth that would later be poured into the mushroom stew (YES, I RECOMMEND USING MUSHROOM BROTH OVER ANY OTHER BROTH). So for those, I cooked them a bit more in brown butter and rosemary, so I got some good flavour. The button and oyster both got cooked in the stew, so I didn’t have to cook them separately at all, but I still decided to dry-roast the button mushrooms with some oregano before adding them to the stew. The king oyster was stir-fried with lemon juice and oil so it got a beautiful lemony flavour and was cooked to perfection. Finally, the enoki was actually served raw, in a little bundle.

I arranged these elements around the central biscuit to look like mushrooms around the base of a tree. One patch of enoki, two halves of a king-oyster, one oyster, three porcini and three button mushrooms to a plate (I did not stick to this exactly, but this was the ideal plan). And the strained mushroom stew was served in a gravy jug on the side.

I highly recommend making this course. Biscuits and gravy is a dish that I find incredibly interesting, especially because they cannot be found anywhere in Indian cuisine, so it feels even more exotic to me.

Recipes - 

Buttermilk biscuits - https://www.spendwithpennies.com/easy-homemade-buttermilk-biscuits/

Mushroom broth - https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/6641-mushroom-broth

Mushroom stew - https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015198-fresh-and-wild-mushroom-stew