Black trumpets are hollow funnels with walls about as thick as paper, so they collapse to a fraction of their volume and add aroma where other mushrooms add texture. Split each one to clean it, cook it in butter for three or four minutes, and let cream, egg or starch carry the flavor.
Your bowl of black trumpets weighs almost nothing and costs a great deal, and the first time you cook them it shrinks to about two spoonfuls. You did nothing wrong. That is simply what this mushroom is, and it all makes sense once you stop treating it as a vegetable.
Why black trumpets act like a seasoning
Black trumpets have no cap, no gills and barely any flesh. What you hold is closer to a shell than to a mushroom.
Split one open and it lies flat, like a scrap of dark leather. The black trumpet profile gives the botanical account. In the kitchen, you are holding a wrapper with no middle.
That one fact rules a lot out. You cannot sear a mushroom with no surface to crust, and you cannot build the body of a dish from something that will be gone in ten minutes. Held up to a window, a trumpet is faintly see-through at the rim, which explains why a pan full of them can look like plenty and produce nothing.
What you can do is move its aroma into something that stays. Fat, cream, egg and starch all hold it, so every good black trumpet dish is really a dish of something else that tastes of black trumpet.
The useful comparison is the golden chanterelle. The two are relatives, but they sit in different genera, Cantharellus for the chanterelle and Craterellus for the trumpet, and they share almost nothing in the pan. Chanterelles have flesh you can sear, while trumpets have an aroma you can lend.
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They shrink far more than any recipe expects. Weigh the bowl before and after, just once, and you will never plan a trumpet dish carelessly again.
| Fresh | After cooking | |
|---|---|---|
| Volume | A large mixing bowl | Two or three spoonfuls |
| Weight | 100 g | Roughly 15 to 20 g |
| Role in the dish | Looks like the main ingredient | Behaves like a spice |
| What a recipe weight assumes | Flesh | There is none |
The lost volume is what catches people out. The bag that looked like enough for a family arrives on the plate as a scattering, and the letdown comes after the money is spent. Shrinkage this severe surprises people because most mushrooms lose water and keep their shape. Trumpets lose water and then collapse, because their shape was only ever a thin wall holding air.
None of that makes them poor value. Just a hundred grams flavors a dish for four generously, which is a better return per gram than almost anything else in a woodland basket. So how much do you need for a given dish? Three rules cover almost every case:
- A hundred grams of fresh trumpets seasons a dish for four generously.
- Ten grams of dried does the same job and takes up no room.
- A teaspoon of the powder seasons a butter, a dough or a piece of fish.
Buy or pick them for flavor, then, and let something else supply the volume. If a recipe calls for three hundred grams of mushroom and you are using trumpets, use a hundred grams of trumpets and something else for the body.
Cleaning an open funnel
The funnel is open at the top, and it has stood in a wood all autumn. Pine needles, grit and the odd small creature end up inside, and none of it comes out while the funnel stays closed. One lengthwise cut opens each funnel flat, and most of the debris falls out as soon as you split it.
None of those numbers is the hard part. The hard part is that you have almost nothing to hold while you do any of it.
Splitting each one from rim to base sounds tedious, yet it takes about two minutes for a full handful. Work over a bowl, since the fine grit that comes out would end up back on mushrooms lying on a board. Once they are open, a dry brush or a shake finishes the job on all but the worst of them.
Water comes last, after the brush and the shake. Trumpets are thin enough to survive a ten-second rinse, but a soak is too much for them. Dry them well afterwards, with more care than a solid mushroom needs. Wet trumpets release their water and their color at once in the pan, and you get a gray puddle where the sauce should be.
Do black trumpets turn food black?
Black trumpets darken whatever you cook them in, and nothing gets around that.
Cream is the case to look at closely, since it is also the dish trumpets suit best. The pigment carries no flavor of its own, so the only question is how you want the plate to look. Some cooks love a slate-gray cream sauce and some find it unappetising, and both reactions are fair.
Wine behaves differently from cream. White wine sauces turn a murky brown-gray that most people dislike, while red wine reductions take the pigment without anyone noticing. Nobody minds the color in a risotto either.
If you want the flavor without the color, cook them separately in butter and stir them in at the end. You lose some of the transfer that makes the mushroom worth using, so this softens the problem without solving it. The one dish to avoid outright is anything meant to be pale and clear, since a consommé with black trumpets in it looks like dishwater however good it tastes.
TechniquesHow to Clean Mushrooms: Quick Rinse, Hidden Grit and DryingHow do you cook black trumpets?
Put butter in the pan, then the trumpets for three or four minutes, then whatever they are flavoring.
The last step catches everyone once. There is no visual cue to wait for, so people keep cooking in search of color that never comes. Cook them every time, and do not eat them raw. Raw mushroom tissue is hard to digest, the funnel holds leaf litter, and the aroma barely exists until heat and fat get at it.
Crowding the pan does little harm here, which is a relief given how few you are likely to have. Spreading them in a single layer is ideal, and a small heap is survivable, because there is no browning to protect and the aroma moves into the fat either way. Searing has no purpose either. With no surface to crust and no inside to protect, the high-heat habit that suits every other mushroom does nothing for this one.
Drying black trumpets
Most species lose something in a dehydrator, and this one arguably does not. Dried may even be the better form, and Fungi Atlas describes the black trumpet as mild when fresh but strongly aromatic once dried.
The last row changes how you shop, because a jar of powder is a year of seasoning bought in one autumn afternoon. They dry faster than any other mushroom worth drying, so a tray of split trumpets dries in an afternoon and comes out looking like black tea leaves. The aroma survives that better than it survives three days in a fridge. The general method for drying mushrooms applies, and this is one of the few species where drying is a first choice and not a rescue.
Ground to a powder, they become something else again. In a spice mill, a jar of them turns into a dark seasoning for pasta dough, a butter or a piece of fish, with no soaking at all.
Keep the soaking liquid, as you would with any dried mushroom, though the case is weaker here. Most of what makes a trumpet worth having moves into fat, so the liquid is useful but not precious. Rehydrated pieces come out limp, and you lose nothing by it, because there was no texture to lose.
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Black trumpets taste smoky and faintly fruity, nothing like the earthy flavor people expect from a dark mushroom. People often compare them to truffle, which is closer than it sounds without being the same thing, since both fill a room with aroma from a small quantity.
Their strength makes restraint the harder discipline. Use them generously and the dish tastes only of them, which wastes whatever else was on the plate. Salt behaves oddly too. With no flesh to season, it goes into whatever the trumpets are flavoring, so season the sauce and ignore the mushrooms.
Key takeaway
Restraint is the whole discipline with this species. When a dish tastes only of black trumpet, everything else on the plate went to waste, and the quantity that gets you there is smaller than it looks.
Acid flattens the aroma. Lemon, vinegar and tomato do it within a minute, so anything sharp belongs on the plate and stays out of the pan.
Dishes that suit them
Once you think of trumpets as a seasoning, the rule is simple. Any dish that can carry an aroma is a good home for them, and any dish that needed a texture is not:
- Cream sauces for pasta, where the transfer is the whole dish.
- Scrambled eggs and omelettes, which take the aroma readily.
- Risotto and polenta, where starch holds it and the color looks deliberate.
- Stirred through a finished braise, late, rather than cooked in it.
Anything dry and hot wastes them. Grilled, roasted or deep fried, a trumpet turns into a burnt fragment and its aroma goes into the air. Those failures share one mechanism, and three things kill the flavor the same way:
- Acid of any kind, added while they are still cooking.
- Long cooking, past about ten minutes in liquid.
- Strong spice, which simply covers them.
Timing within a dish counts as well. Trumpets added at the start of a long braise have given everything up by the time you serve it, while the same handful stirred in ten minutes before the end perfumes the whole pot. Reheating does them no harm.
Crowding them out with other flavors is the subtler failure. In a dish with six other strong ingredients, trumpets add nothing you could name, and that is an expensive way to make a stew.
Buying and keeping them
You want them dry, papery and loose in the bag. Damp, matted or ammonia-smelling trumpets have been sitting too long.
Tip
If you are not cooking them within a day or two, dry them the evening they arrive. Fresh trumpets are one of the shortest-lived mushrooms you can buy, and dried ones are close enough to fresh that the decision is easy.
They fruit in autumn under hardwoods, and they are famously hard to find because black on dark leaf litter is nearly invisible. The wider autumn foraging season sets when to start looking. Foraged and bought trumpets behave the same way. Nobody cultivates them, so a bag in a shop came out of a wood just like a bag in your basket.
Their price shocks people. Black trumpets cost several times what a cultivated mushroom does by weight, and by usable volume the multiple is larger still, which is the arithmetic behind treating them as a spice. Fresh ones keep three or four days at best and go slimy at the rim first, so check the rim when you decide whether a bag is still worth cooking.
Two things separate a good bag from a poor one at the counter:
- Loose rather than matted, since matted means damp and damp means a short life.
- Whole funnels rather than a bag of fragments, because fragments have already been handled hard.
Weight is a poor guide here for the obvious reason. Most bags feel like nothing in the hand, and judging quantity by hand is how people end up buying half of what they needed.
For keeping, the freezer comes a poor third behind eating them and drying them. Even so, aroma survives freezing better than it survives a fridge. Cooked into butter and frozen, a season's trumpets keep most of what they had, a useful fallback if you picked more than you can dry.
