Matsutake Lunch 松茸の昼食

It is autumn and time to enjoy the seasonal dishes featuring Matsutake. In the past we have gotten fresh matsutake in the US from various sources. In recent years, we have gotten some very good ones from Weee but this year, they didn’t carry it. So, we got one pound from “Oregon Mushrooms”; one of the other sources we have used. I posted many times about  Matsutake 松茸 dishes.  This post is a summary of the various dishes I made this year. Each dish will appear in greater detail in subsequent posts. One of the major changes I made this year, was using “Nagatani-en” Matsutake-flavored clear soup 永谷園松茸風味お吸い物 in the dishes. The idea of using this flavored soup was presented to us many years ago by our Japanese friends. They mentioned that the advantage of using this matsutake seasoned broth was that it would enhance the matsutake flavor in the dish. This flavor enhancement would be especially helpful because North American matsutake has less prominent flavor compared to Japanese ones. Nonetheless we never followed up on this suggestion until this year and we have to say their observation was 100 percent correct. It really added to the overall matsutake experience.

The pic shows the matsutake dishes we had as a lunch (Picture #1). These were our usual matsutake rice 松茸ご飯, matsutake clear soup 松茸のお吸い物 and daikon and persimmon layered pickles 大根と柿の重ね漬け (this is new). Since I used “matsutake-flavored”  soup base for the matsutake rice and soup, they will be the subject of individual new posts. I also added a post about the new daikon and persimmon pickles for extra good measure. (I also used the soup base in chawamushi 茶碗蒸し, but did not take any pics so that dish will not be posted.)