In both the garlic mushroom toastie recipes below mushrooms are sliced and fried with a little oil, a huge dollop of garlic purée (1tsp/4 mushrooms), salt and pepper. If we ever do run out of animals and have to live off bugs and greens, this is where I’m going first.
Mushrooms and I have always had a fairly complicated relationship. I hated them, then at university I realised they were cheap, and lived of them in first year until I remembered I didn’t like them. Now we have a messy love/hate relationship, helped along by garlic. Garlic is my wingman, but I’m pretty sure they’re somehow both cheating on me.
We are often asked for mushrooms in a toastie, and while the mushroom rarebit (porchini, chestnut and oyster mushrooms, crispy onions, cheddar and rarebit sauce) is amazing, I wanted to try something slightly more straightforward.
My First Garlic Mushroom Toastie
– Cheddar
– Garlic Mushrooms
My Second Garlic Mushroom Toastie
– Crispy fried Pancetta
– Garlic mushrooms
Taste.
Of the First. It’s rich and satisfyingly meaty, and it’s full of garlic. Henderson’s is a lovely ingredient, suitable for vegans but still excellently solid and flavoursome. Picture northern cooking. That’s what it’s like. I liked this one, but for Barny it was too close to the rarebit, and didn’t have enough meat in. 6/10
Of the Second. This solved the meat issue. Pancetta is good in terms of its size to flavour ratio, but we don’t use it a lot because in a toastie needs to be full of meat and cheese, and panchetta is not not good value for that, it being decidedly thin and skimpy compared to normal bacon. Then there’s the Jarlsberg. It’s a lot like Leerdammer and Emmental, apparently the cultures are similar, but this one is Norwegian. It hasn’t quite got the depth of Emmental, but it melts exceptionally well and, I’m informed, is a classic with NY Grilled cheese trucks. With the mushrooms to compliment the cheese there is a lot more flavour to go round, and pancetta might be a better choice than bacon. I’m thinking pancetta lardons cooked with the mushrooms, perhaps a splash of Henderson’s in there as well…7.5/10
Appeal
Mushrooms are popular, bacon is popular. It’s a wintery option, but it would be a fairly hearty meal and would keep you going. I think we may need to try the bacon version (sorry veggies) at some point in the future, but the veggie version isn’t out yet. I would quite happily eat it on a day to day basis, so there might well be scope to give it a test in the wild and see how it gets on. 7/10
Suitability as a signature.
I feel like we might be getting closer to something signatury here. This certainly isn’t what I’d want the Jabberwocky legacy to resemble, but a deliciously crafted mix of flavours and a big ole’ pile of cheese? I could get on board with that. Especially when bacon is involved. 6/10
Difficulty Rating
Frying mushrooms with garlic does require basic cooking, but if I can do it, so can you. It does make this a little more time-consuming than just opening packets though, so it would be whatever the second-lowest cooking rating is. We’ll call it “meh”.
I would like to think this experiment is gradually getting somewhere. 6 days in and 12 toasties down. How many more combinations can there be?
When is the cookbook with these coming out?
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