Gozo: Made from pounded manioc that's reconsituted like polenta, but so much denser.

The Internet does not yet know all. In part, I’m adding this post because searches for gozo do not produce recipe wisdom. So far, this manioc-flour specialty of the Central African Republic has failed to catch on among cosmopolitan American foodies.

I’m making gozo for an Africa-themed dinner party. It’s been years since I subsisted on this ball of food that is essentially the national starch of CAR.

And I can see why. In Africa it was a taste that most of us expats acquired after a while. I loved it, as I love almost all starches. But it has a texture that is reminiscent of Play-Doh and combines an odd funky smell with a slightly sour, otherwise perfectly bland flavor. It isn’t very appetizing unless you have a big bowl of peanut stew around. (Although once when we were desperate for dessert I do recall stuffing bits of peanut butter and sugar inside small balls of gozo, as though they were truffles. Another time I mixed gozo with cocoa powder and sculpted it into a gorilla, like marzipan.)

The fellows I lived with pounded gozo with a giant pestle each morning. They would toss it into a vat of boiling water, mix it with a sturdy stick very quickly, and voila: Big communal ball of gozo. They all plucked off bits and dipped them in sauce as quickly as they could, so they would get their fair shares. At our Saturday-night dinner parties each person would instead get his own, which allowed people to slow down some.

Once I tried to make gozo in the States. I bought the wrong flour and it went very wrong. It smelled like feet and it was years until I tried again. Then it came out not only smelly but terribly lumpy.

At the African market in Madison, the West African shop owner showed me to the correct cassava flour. She also told me that it’s dicey to use the method I knew from CAR. She prefers to mix the flour in cold water and slowly heat it while stirring, as though it were polenta. My test batch rolled into a ball but seemed rather uncooked — gozo grows a bit translucent when cooked, whereas this was perfectly opaque. Solution: steam the ball. It works!

The only other gozo recipe I could find on the Internet just says to mix cassava flour and water until you have gozo. Kind of missing the spirit of recipe-writing. So I’m filing this for any other CAR-homesick Westerners who can’t quite figure it out.

Don’t ask me about quantities. You’ll just have to work it out. I’m guessing I used approximately equal parts water and gozo, maybe more gozo.

Also, the cassava flour I have found in the States has always tasted a little stale. I suppose there’s no getting around that.

I welcome suggestions on any of this.

Gozo (traditional method)

Bring water to a boil. Dump in cassava flour all at once. Stir enthusiastically with a very strong utensil; it takes some forearm strength. I have broken spoons this way.

Or try my way:

Gozo (new method)

Mix gozo and cold water. Slowly heat while stirring until it mixes into a ball. Add more gozo if needed. Once you have a ball, put a collapsible steamer into the pot and pour some water down. Flatten the ball into a sort of disk. Steam for a few minutes. Then knead the ball with a fork to expose any uncooked bits and steam some more. Wrap in plastic; it should keep a day or two.

In case you find these disappointing, here’s a surefire recipe for pili-pili, or at least the version I learned in CAR. (I think pili-pili just means hot sauce, generally.) This is a sort of confit of peppers and onions that tastes sweet at first, making you think you should add more, then produces a lasting burn that worsens over time until you grow to regret it. I find it addictive.

Pili-pili

Equal parts of these:
Onions, minced
Scotch bonnet or habanero peppers, minced
Neutral oil
Cumin

Mash in a mortar and pestle (sometimes I just mince it finely).
Then fry in oil on low heat until the onions are thoroughly caramelized.
Add cumin seeds, or a very good curry powder if you can find it, and fry a few minutes more.

This year, alas, we were too early for berries. The currant-skeins were all so small and green …

However, we were not too early for Dolly Vardens. Named, I remind you, for a flirty Dickens tart in a polka-dotted dress. Dollies are hardly flirtatious, though. They’ll just eat whatever, and that’s why I love them.

They taste like a delicate cross between trout and salmon. Yet salmon and halibut, the big fatty brutes, get far more attention. Lucky me.

Of course, W. and I are not averse to salmon-fishing. We carried home two of the four we caught, frozen and wrapped in my wedding-party attire. (The wedding being the ostensible occasion we were there; the fishing being the actual reason.)

If W. learned anything as a teenaged deckhand on a charter-fishing boat, he learned how to make fish look big in the photo. I think the blood makes it look like he won a knife-fight with the fish.

Rockfish: Disparaged by salmon fishermen, but it makes the best Thai fish cakes.

Other notable edibles:

• Beach asparagus, a salty vegetable I just learned about. Would make excellent salad garnish.

Foraging for the masses: The Shriners in their tiny cars and everyone else at the 4th of July parade spend most of the parade throwing taffy at people. Sartorial note: Shriners in Alaska wear fancy rubber boots from Fred Meyer.

• A Maryland-style crab boil, with newspapers festively lining the table — Maryland-style except for the size of the crabs — something I’d been yearning for since I left Alaska. Incidentally, PSP has recently been found in Southeast Alaska crab guts. (You never ate the guts anyway, but do be careful.) I am concerned that the anthropogenic rise in sea temperatures will bode ill for my love affair with Dungies and other Alaska shellfish. If the oysters start getting spawny in Kake, that’s when I’ll grow a beard, slash my clothes and start wandering the streets with signs about Impending Doom.

The actual reason we went to Alaska: A wedding in Excursion Inlet, two hours' boat ride from Juneau. This picture marks the first time I have mixed high heels with seaweed.

Wisconsin has its charms, such as the four gallon bags of cherries I put in the freezer last week. But I left my heart somewhere in Gastineau Channel — to feed, naturally, the Dolly Vardens I hope to catch on my return.

That could have happened in Madison. This probably couldn’t:

Those smudges are bear pawprints. A fellow forager: the hummingbear!

People go crazy over these, but they taste pretty much like garlicky green onions you've had before but with a tender leaf. The reason we go crazy is because wild things are always better. It's not rational, but there you have it.

I’d never even heard of them until last year, and didn’t get to try them until the end of spring. They are $3 a tiny bunch at the Dane County Farmer’s Market: rich people’s food. I bought them anyway this year, and ate them with sunchokes and eggs from Clucky, Flappy and the gang. But hoarded them carefully, used them in bits.

Buying them once allowed me to get to know them well enough to spot them in the forest—and now I have a couple of pounds to play with.

Pizza? Dumplings? Soup? The Pope’s Risotto?

Please hold while we are frozen with indecision.

UPDATE: Ticks—check.

Curd in cloth; and unmolded two days later.

Curd-ladling. Very gently.

The occasion was a fermentation party for which, despite the main requirement of fermentation, I hadn’t planned ahead but had promised goat cheesecake. And then I got the flu and was unable to move, let alone think, let alone leave the house to get goat milk, let alone handle the complex deeds of sanitation and recipe-following. But by Friday afternoon I could summon the energy to surf the Internet.

Where I discovered a recipe from Fias Co Farm in Michigan that made it all sound perfectly doable — and a tip that a major hobbyist-cheesemakers’ supply shop, the Dairy Connection, is minutes from my house. And so I summoned a box of tissues and dragged myself there, and bought a cheesemaking manual, six chevre molds, liquid rennet, mesophilic culture and a My First Penicillium bacterial Chia pet, and some goat milk on the way home.

The fresh cheese hung for six or eight hours.

Making fresh goat cheese is easier than most mozzarella. You just heat your milk to 72 degrees, add culture and rennet, and wait 3/4 day. Then ladle the curds into a cheesecloth bag to drain for six hours. Voila. The tricky parts were sanitation, because there is no speck of my life that does not involve cat hair, and finding a way to hang the bag.

A gallon of goat milk, transformed.

It made a rich tangy cheese and a smooth, not-at-all-goaty (I wish it had been more so) cheesecake. And I got some ricotta out of the whey.

But since I was breaking out the iodophor and goat milk, I might as well finally try making some aged cheese, I figured. Something not too tricky. I bought an extra half-gallon of milk for this experiment.

Not shown, but included in these molds: A small amount of cat hair. Unavoidable. No one will notice. Right?

This one is supposed to end up roughly like Saint-Maure, covered in fuzz and creamy inside, in a couple of weeks.

Two days later, I unmolded the cheeses and set them on a draining mat in my little “cheese cave.” Someday, I tell you, I will own an actual cheese cave set into a hillside with grass growing over the top. For now, I have Tupperware.

!!!

The turkey’s purpose is to inspire a group of non-turkey hunters before their turkey hunt this weekend. Just before turkey season begins for everyone else, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has a Learn to Hunt program, organized by Karl. I’ll be hunting, even though I lost my glasses this week. As will W., and a few other wild-food-friendly friends. It’s a natural progression from hunting mushrooms to hunting moving prey, a leap that requires substantially more hand-eye coordination.

I am petrified of drying out the meat; Ruhlman has advised keeping the temperature as low as possible. Also, we may have to engage in some Poor Housewife Witchery to stretch it out over the expected crowd. Perhaps something involving the other Wild Turkey.

Tastes like salami, but more so than usual: smoother, richer, funkier. The extra pork fat stayed nicely separate from the meat, which validated my OCD efforts to keep it cold during the grinding process.

However, it was indispensable in creating the perfect sausage-curing climate. Perhaps if the manufacturers had mentioned that use on the packaging, I would have been less skeptical.

The sausages are delicious — Tuscan salami and chorizo — and I still haven’t died of botulism. Success! I’m a little daunted by the giant brown-paper bag of sausage in the bottom of my fridge. So I hope everyone who invites me to a potluck in the next month is salami-friendly.

Things I learned along the way:

• The perfect drying box (amended from last post) was a cardboard box. Unlined. Even in my dry house (20 percent humidity), the box alone with a bowl of saltwater in it was enough to keep the humidity around 65-70 percent. I had also been spraying the sausages with saltwater at first to prevent case hardening, but this was probably overkill.
• The bad mold (penicillium-like, starts white, turns green then black) started to grow on the salami when the humidity was too high, around 85 percent. I never let it get too far before wiping down the sausages with salt-saturated cheesecloth. But sometimes I had to do this daily. I think the mold left a slight funk, removable with the casings, and didn’t substantially invade or harm the sausage.
• Lower temperatures = longer curing time. The book said 18-20 days at 60 degrees; my temps were 50-60, and they took at least 30 days.
• In the last week, the links had lost the appropriate amount of weight (30 percent), but were still squishy by my reckoning. I opened the boxes and covered them with thin dark cloth (dark to keep the fat from oxidizing in light) to lower the humidity a bit, and I think the sausages were happier for it.
• The Charcuterie chorizo is good stuff — dark, smoky, pungent — but could have used more spice, especially hot peppers, garlic and smoked paprika.

The chorizo benefited from lessons learned by the salami, being the younger child by a week. Miraculously, despite my mental block regarding sanitation and the fact that the sausages cured in the same moldy old room together, the chorizo only grew little bits of happy mold (white and not fuzzy). But I did give it several preventive salt-wipes.

Now, what next? Peter says I should cure a ham, but W. may be happy to work in an office that doesn’t smell like meat for a while.

Spanish-style chorizo. Perhaps not as spicy as I'd wished, but still delicious: Hard, pungent, concentrated flavor; leaner than the salami, just the right amount of salt (hey, I followed the recipe for once).

The sausage and I are on the same page with this one.

This weekend, I ground and stuffed Tuscan salami, my first attempt at dry-curing. I also discovered that my basement/curing cellar is running around 40 percent humidity — much lower than the 60-70 percent recommended. If the casings dry out and harden, they no longer allow water from the inside of the sausage to escape — i.e., the magic of dry-curing.

I spritzed the sausages hourly while I mulled what to do.

I was going to add a humidifier to the basement, but my neighbor pointed out that basements typically do not respond well to wetness.

Ruhlman and Polcyn, in Charcuterie, suggest an old fridge, unplugged, with salted water in the bottom to keep the humidity up (salted to discourage germ growth). But my local thrift shops had nothing. Freecycle and Craigslist did not provide. And I’m not all that keen, anyway, on adding another big appliance to the basement.

So my curing box, at the moment, is a cardboard box. It has plastic duct-taped to line the insides, a pan of water in the bottom and a dowel thrust through the handles. It’s a little small for the purpose, but humidity is at 70 percent and holding. The ne plus ultra of climate control, if not of elegance. The experiment is off and running. Now it’s time to pray to the iodophore gods that our sanitation was sufficient, and that the Bactoferm F-RM-52 is able and energetic, and that the cats do not escape into the basement and make trouble.

And now I just need a dry-curing box for myself.

Chanterelles: hard to miss, harder to clean.

The search cost for many mushrooms, so sparse and unpredictable, would seem to be too expensive for what you get — except that you weigh those costs not only against the find’s quantity and deliciousness, but your irrational desire for the quest itself, or to conquer the maddening woods.

Chanterelles are pleasantly untricky to find. But they are the mushrooms for which I’ve paid the steepest price so far. Mosquitos by the hundreds give me the supreme heebie-jeebies. They even drove W. batty.

See that smile? It is crazed by two hours of having being eaten alive, and yet having chosen that fate. Also, please note that I am not usually drenched in sweat.

Then once you’ve found them, the price becomes steeper still. All the books say not to soak them, so you begin with a toothbrush and a paring knife to cut off all the dirt until you go mad or run out of hours to spend mushroom-cleaning. Then you begin to consider that you found them after a giant rain and try soaking them anyway, which is pretty effective, but you still have to treat each one’s baroque little folds individually with a knife. The human mouth is unhappily adept at finding even the tiniest bit of grit, and most come with quite a bit more.

In addition to the dirt, lots of these guys turn out to be hollow — pre-eaten by haute-gastro maggots. When you discover the motherlode like we did, you gradually grow snobby and stop collecting ones that look like this; it's practically a law of foraging economics.

How not to clean a chanterelle — unless you're as crazy as I am. It is effective, though. Another note: Not my regular toothbrush.

My final advice is not to soak them, but if you must soak them, which is only reasonable, it works better on mushrooms that have dried out in the fridge a bit. And then, if you can leave them on towels overnight, you will have a better shot at sauteing them properly.

Ah. Finally clean. Ish.

Do Not Crowd the Mushrooms.

You do that in a wok at very high heat, giving each mushroom some personal space. After a few moments add a bit of olive oil or butter and a generous dash of salt. The mushrooms begin to weep, and you keep them moving so they aren’t sitting in the juice, which evaporates almost as quickly as it appears. If the mushrooms were very wet, pour off the liquid as it appears (and save it for something delicious). Then they are done crying, and they begin to brown, and you are in a good situation.

These little orange guys we fried for garnishes. The black chanterelles are related but a whole nother story; they are in the picture just so I can boast that I found them.

Our first batch of chanterelles ended up in a classic cream of chanterelle soup, the way Escoffier did it (except for my stock, a mixture of raccoon, duck and chicken). Incredible. Nearly unwound the hours of mosquito-induced stress from the hunt. But way too rich to eat more than a few spoonfuls. You can’t eat loads of chanterelles that way, and we had loads of chanterelles to eat.

So, pizza, omelets etc. Arduous, happy task.

Fresh mozzarella, garlic, chanterelles, olive oil, basil, etc.

But if you don’t feel like going to all that trouble, you can just blanch and pickle them, as I did with the last three quarts of mushrooms (and if you blanch, no need to worry about cleaning them dry, right?) Chez Pim has posted an excellent recipe with golden raisins and unfiltered apple cider vinegar. Pickled chanterelles maintain a texture that’s softer than their raw form, but truer to it than the sauteed version. Delicious and strange. We have quarts of them to finish, alas.

Boletus pulverulentus. Perhaps not the Ur-mushroom, but it has its good points. At right, the cleanest ones I ever saw growing, freaks of their kind.

Because of that the boletes were the Ur-mushroom in my mind. As you know the porcino, queen of mushrooms, is a bolete. So about a month ago, when I discovered a wood that was scattered with them — all over, so many underfoot I couldn’t help but step on some of them — I thought my life charmed. I discovered the boletes at the same time as the mosquitos discovered me, about two steps into the forest. They were the worst I can remember encountering; it is hard to to believe they are crepuscular feeders, because in broad daylight I was losing blood by the micropint every second. The DEET was a cruel joke, and I took to spraying it directly onto the bugs in the air, not because it seemed to deter them one whit, but just out of spite. I collected three basketfuls of boletes, and some frilly chanterelles that grew on the hillside to boot.

My dirty bolete haul. Plus a chicken of the woods, some chanterelles, some raspberries, and smatterings of seven or eight other kinds of boletes. I lost at least this much in blood and marbles, though.

They were impossible to see unless I stalked them, or saw their yellow bellies from underneath, if I were looking up the hill at them. They were sticky-topped, covered with brown leaves and dirt of exactly their color, and every part of them stained deep blue with the slightest touch. They had thin stalks, not the bulbous soup-stockers of Boletus edulis. I began to realize they were not the Ur-mushroom, thinking of what it would take to clean them, but their smell was heady and animalic like porcini.

At home I found it or its kin being called a “dirty bolete,” as Michael Kuo said — Boletus pulverulentus. He describes its taste as “undistinctive.” And as they turned to total slime from washing or even touching them, I began to wonder whether I had duped myself. Then fried a few, and was glad I did. The blue goes away then. So does the slime. The meaty flavor remains. I dried the rest, hoping to kill the slime.

Fried, the dirty bolete's personality much improves.

A week later I was out with the Wisconsin Mycological Society’s fungus veterans, and startled to learn that none of them had much good to say about boletes. And after I found the first crop of huge ones in the forest, I learned why. They were rosy-topped, bulbous, huge, growing in perfect clusters — untouched by the beetles that had dismantled so many of my dirty little ones — and the reason why is that they were unbearably bitter.

The WMS veterans nodded, bored at the lack of chanterelles thus far, and mentioned that’s what boletes were usually like in this part of Wisconsin. Beautiful but, with a few exceptions, inedible.

They also concurred with my decision to dry the ones I’d found. The question remains whether I have cleaned them sufficiently. Grit in the mushrooms can ruin the prize.

That day with the WMS at Kettle Moraine we found little of note — until I fell behind the pack and came upon a new Ur-mushroom: a nearly inexhaustible vein of golden chanterelles, which will wait for another post.