Herbie Likes Spaghetti: Tour of Istria Day 4: Makaruni with Chanterelle Mushrooms (Makaruni con Funghi Gallanaci)

After taking a break from cooking for a day and enjoying some delicious leftovers, we embarked on the final day of our Tour of Istria. Day four featured a recipe from Lidia Bastianich's book which called for a fresh pasta in a chanterelle mushroom sauce. We took a few liberties with this recipe, the most noticeable being the swap of freshly made ravioli for the makaruni.

See, Herbie really does like pasta! Although, it probably helps that these were stuffed with prosciutto and cheese.

This was one of our favorites of the Istria tour. It's a very simple preparation, with the mushrooms cooked in a sauce of tomato paste and chicken broth. This gives the sauce a slightly more chicken-y flavor than you'd expect from your every day red sauce, and the sage gives it a unique complexity. All together, the simple preparation and the comforting flavor makes this one that we'll likely return to in the future.

Making the Dish

The first thing to do is get all your vegetables prepared. This will make the preparation fly by once you start cooking. Thinly slice up your onions and chop up the mushrooms to your liking. Since they're the star of the dish, we sliced them more coarsely, leaving nice big fleshy pieces of mushroom to eat up later. One other important change here is that chanterelles aren't completely necessary. They're somewhat difficult to find, so we used oyster mushrooms in their stead. You could also swap for cremini, portabella, or pretty much any other kind of mushroom you like. Shred up the sage, and dice up your garlic.

Everything chopped up, ready to go.

Throw everything into a saute pan except for the mushrooms, and let your vegetables sauté in olive oil until they start to soften and turn color.

Into the pot they go, onions, garlic, and sage first, mushrooms later.

At this point, add in your mushrooms, stir them around until they're nicely coated with olive oil. Add some salt, and then cover the pan briefly to let the mushrooms cook. They'll start to exude some juices after a few moments, and at that point you can take the cover off to let the juices evaporate.

With the juices mostly evaporated, you can add in the tomato paste. Put it into its own spot on the pan to let it get cooked and somewhat caramelized.

Just getting to know each other, getting ready to mix and mingle in the next step...

Once it's starting to give off a really nice, tomatoey aroma, stir it into your vegetables and get them coated with the paste. Cook for a few minutes, and then add in your chicken broth. Just enough to turn it into a flowing sauce, but not too soupy.

Starting to look more like a tomato sauce now as we add the chicken broth and start to cook it down.

Let it cook down until most of the chicken broth is evaporated, then add a little more and repeat. Do this maybe a third or fourth time until the mushrooms are nice and tender. On the last turn, cook it down to the point where the sauce is to the consistency of your liking.

To finish off the sauce, add some grated cheese and parsley and stir it all together. Toss it in with the pasta, and you're all set!

We used about a quarter cup of grated parmesan. Wait to adjust your salt until adding the cheese, as the cheese is inherently salty.

The Wine

The wine we chose tonight was an experiment. It's a montepulciano d'abruzzo by Ca' Donini. We picked it because we wanted an Italian red to go with the red sauce, and have enjoyed montepulciano d'abruzzos before. For the price of $10, we figured it was worth a try.

Unfortunately, it tasted pretty cheap, with a tangy aftertaste that didn't go down very smoothly. It's good to experiment, but we won't be going back to this one.

The Result

As we mentioned above, this was a great sauce that will go well with whatever kind of pasta is on hand. It's very simple to prepare and because there's no meat, it's really cheap to purchase the ingredients. We'll be back to this one.