Baked polenta with wild mushrooms

This baked polenta with mushrooms recipe layers firm rounds of polenta with sautéed wild mushrooms in a crème fraîche sauce.

My search for ways to use up my recent glut of St. George’s mushrooms has led me to today’s dish – rounds of firm-set baked polenta with sautéed wild mushrooms in a gorgeous crème fraîche sauce. Stone-ground polenta (it must be stone-ground to really be considered a whole grain) is a fabulously satisfying starch and has the added benefit of being naturally gluten-free.

I am eating healthier than at any other time in my life at the moment. I have been consciously upping the quantity of vegetables and low-sugar fruits I consume, and have switched almost entirely to whole grains. But the only way I can even consider maintaining this life-affirming change is by making it absolutely delicious – meals full of mouth-watering ingredients and preparations with not a hint of deprivation. One of the most important things I realised about healthy eating, was that it’s not about giving up the things you love. Nothing is going to make those foods more attractive than the idea that they are banned. Rather I have tried to cram my diet with foods that I love, which just happen to be healthy. The less healthy foods, while still available and still eaten when I fancy, are crowded out by the healthier options.

This dish contains crème fraîche, which has the potential to be rather heavy, but it is well watered down in a rich mushroom stock and is far outweighed by the whole grain polenta, the crushed garlic and the plentiful wild mushrooms (you can, of course, substitute cultivated mushrooms as necessary). I did add a small amount of strongly flavoured cheese, but this is very much optional – the mushroom sauce packs so much fantastic flavour that the dish up stands perfectly well on its own.

To make this vegan, finish the sauce with a little coconut or soy cream. A very light touch of lemon juice will help to add the subtle tartness of crème fraîche.

The rounds are made by cooking the polenta with a 1 to 4 liquid ratio, spreading it out on a couple of baking tins, then cutting out rounds with a biscuit cutter or some other similarly shaped object. Don’t worry, the bits in between the cut outs won’t go to waste – you can use them on the bottom layers. Wet polenta doesn’t stick to anything you pour it onto, so don’t bother with baking paper. I used paper to separate the layers of rounds after I had cut them, but that was only because I wasn’t using them until the next day and I wanted to stack them on top of each other to save space in the fridge.

The wild mushroom sauce is made by combining two of my favourite techniques for pulling maximum tastiness out of mushrooms. Firstly, the mushrooms are sautéed dry in a hot pan to brown and caramelise them – the searing generates fantastically concentrated flavours. Secondly (once the mushrooms have been set aside), water and wine is added to the pan to deglaze (read a whole post dedicated to this technique here) and garlic is added to gently stew in the newly created stock. Once the garlic is well and truly softened and fragrant (about 15 minutes on low heat), the mushrooms are returned to the pan to stew with the garlic and release the very last of their juices into the sauce base.

The resulting wild mushroom broth is something special and can be finished as you fancy, depending on the recipe. Here a couple of tablespoons of crème fraîche is added to bring a little richness to the sauce – it will still be a liquidy sauce, not thick and creamy. But it will soak into the polenta beautifully and you will marvel at the stunning amount of flavour that has been generated from so few ingredients.

Baked polenta with wild mushrooms – warming, filling and nutritious; creamy and garlicky, with incredible umami flavour. That sounds like autumn to me…