Species 004: Miso Mushroom and Parmesan Turnovers
A lot of people probably think this about their own mothers, but my mom is the best around town. I grew up with four siblings (three brothers and one sister), and she tackled the job of taking care of us and my dad with aplomb. We’re Korean by genes and American at heart, but I swear something in my mom is Italian because her pastas are better than those at many a fine Italian restaurant—excuse me saying so.
When I was living in San Francisco, I came down with a series of health issues that lasted for a few months, and I was really struggling. I’m the kind of person who enjoys my independence and doesn’t like depending on others so much, but I was completely worn out between work and taking care of my dog, Daisy. My mom, the exemplar of motherly love and care, flew out from Connecticut under the pretense of “just making some soup” and ended up staying for a week to cook, clean, walk my dog, and generally make me feel like a well-cared-for child again. One of the meals she cooked for me while she was there was this Miso Mushroom Pasta by Yi Jun Loh for Food52. When I begged her not to go through the trouble, she said it was so easy there was no reason not to make it.
Species 004: These savory turnovers are packed full of mushrooms, garlic, red miso, butter, parmesan, scallions, and a touch of heavy cream for that decadence and comfort everyone deserves in the morning.
Of course, when I tried the pasta I was thoroughly glad she had made it. The recipe is simple, with few ingredients and few steps, but the flavor is incredible. It helps that my mom is the master of cooking pasta perfectly al dente and marrying pasta and its sauce with some starchy cooking water. Still, the robust, complex flavor of the red miso paste, the earthiness of the mushrooms, and the heartiness of the butter and cream lingered in my mind as one of the best flavor profiles I’d tasted.
I decided that I wanted to adapt this recipe into a pastry, both in homage to the original Food52 recipe and to my mother, who always was and probably always will be the best at taking care of me.
Primary Traits
When I set out to adapt this pasta recipe, I knew I wanted to end up with a pastry that was homey, hearty, and utterly comforting. I also liked the idea of emphasizing the union of Asian and European flavors, which is one of my favorite trends in food right now.
Don’t feel guilty, sometimes you have to get down to business…
The first decision I had to make was what analogue I would replace the pasta with. I played with the idea of making a rustic tart, a galette, a quiche, and the like, but I ultimately wanted something more down-to-earth and personal—something you could easily grab and dig into whenever you were feeling in need of some comfort food.
I settled on making turnovers because of their undeniable practicality—not necessarily in making them but in eating them. They’re meal packets, which is why they’ve been adapted into hits like Toaster Strudels and Hot Pockets, and they freeze incredibly well unbaked. This means that you can make a batch, freeze half of them, and have an emergency supply to pull out and bake when you get sick or are just plain old tired. They are the epitome of comfort food and are most commonly made with rich, buttery puffed pastry. It’s the kind of savory packet that you wake up looking forward to eat, and eating a turnover is a precious little moment to yourself—an individual serving of TLC.
Trait #1: Rough Puff Pastry
Puff pastry, a kind of laminated dough, comes in many varieties—most notably traditional, inverted, and rough puff. Traditional puff pastry, wherein the butter is laminated with the dough and folded/turned multiple times, is the “finest” of them. It’s best suited for pastries where the number and integrity of the layers really matters. Inverted puff pastry, to be frank, is a pain in the butt and from what I can tell offers no advantage except showing off. With inverted puff, the dough is laminated in the butter instead of the other way around, so you have to reckon with the butter while turning the dough.
I enjoy making traditional puff and find the laminating process to be soothing, but it is a time-consuming, tedious process to be sure. Rough puff pastry—which resembles a kind of pie dough that is then folded and turned in the fashion of traditional puff—results in flaky, buttery layers in a shorter amount of time. It’s also a more forgiving pastry to work with. For rustic pastries, I think the time-quality tradeoff between traditional puff and rough puff is well worth it, so I decided to go with a rough puff base for these turnovers.
Trait #2: Miso Mushroom Filling
The most common roadblock when making turnovers is getting the moisture level of the filling correct. You can’t just throw any filling into a turnover, and I knew that I couldn’t get away with simply making the Food52 pasta sauce and dumping it into some puffed pastry. If the moisture level is too high, the pastry will become soggy. If the filling is too dry, the eating experience becomes a chore best concluded by a swig of water.
When creating a turnover filling, I start by evaluating whether the base filling recipe is going to be too wet or too dry. This intuition comes over time, but I knew that the miso-mushroom-cream sauce would be too wet for a turnover. In the case of a filling being too wet, I find that thickening it with a little flour or cornstarch is a great place to start.
For the first iteration, I stuck with the Food52 recipe ratios as they were but created a roux—a butter-flour paste that is used to thicken many French sauces—by adding flour to the miso-butter mixture. The flavor was excellent, the texture silky and smooth, but I ended up with a bit of a bursting problem, i.e. the turnovers hemorrhaged in the oven leaving the delicious filling stuck to the baking sheet instead of inside the pastry.
I fixed this issue in the second iteration by doing two things: (1) decreasing the cream to mushroom ratio and adjusting the amount of roux accordingly; and (2) freezing the turnovers before baking them. These modifications decrease the moisture in the filling so it is more easily contained by the pastry and prevent the filling from bubbling up before the pastry has had time to bake properly.
Trait #3: Parmesan Topping
The final twist I put on the recipe was a sprinkling of good grated parmesan, both into the filling and onto the turnovers before baking. I’ve noticed a trend in a lot of Asian fusion restaurants these days where they add cheese to traditional Asian dishes, and I am loving it. One of my favorite renditions is the Spicy Rice Cakes at Kawa Ni in Westport, CT. I grew up eating these spicy, sweet, chewy, pasta-like rice cakes at home, and I was delighted to find that Kawa Ni’s addition of parmesan and mustard greens to the dish was simply delicious. The fact is that good Italian parmesan plays very nicely with the sweet umami-forward flavor profile of a lot of Asian dishes, and I knew that these Miso Mushroom Turnovers could be improved by a hint of parmesan in the filling and a layer of crisp parmesan on the pastry itself.
Resulting Species
The resulting turnovers are just the kind of thing you want to eat when feeling under the weather, physically or mentally. The insane amount of butter and cream banish this pastry from the realm of “health food”—but I believe that where kale and quinoa cater to physical health, pastries cater to emotional health. And even with all the fat and cream, the bright saltiness of the red miso, the earthy bite of the mushrooms, and the funky sharpness of the parmesan creates a flavor profile that just dances on the tongue—a sure thing to cheer you up. Enjoy!
Until next time,
The Culinary Darwinist
Miso Mushroom and Parmesan Turnovers
Makes about 16 five-inch turnovers
Ingredients
For the Rough Puff Pastry
For the Miso Mushroom Filling
To Assemble
Method
Make the pastry
- Using either a box grater or a food processor, grate the frozen butter. If you're grating by hand, I find it best to wrap a clean dishtowel around the butter that you're holding, to prevent melting. Return the grated butter to the freezer for about 5 minutes. In the meantime, combine the flour and salt in a medium bowl.
- Once the butter is fully frozen again, add it to the flour mixture and use your hands to toss the butter in the flour. The butter will crumble apart a little—that's okay. In the end, all your butter should be coated in flour. Gradually add the ice water, tossing the dough with your hands to incorporate it as you go. Once you have a shaggy dough, turn it out onto a floured surface and knead just until smooth (about 1 minute). The dough will smooth out a little as you fold it, so don't worry about getting it completely smooth and elastic. Pat the dough into a thick square, cover, and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.
- Roll the dough out into a large, vertical rectangle about 1/2" thick. Brush off the excess flour. Fold the bottom third of the rectangle up, brush off the flour, and fold the top third of the rectangle down. Cover and chill for another 20 minutes.
- Lay the dough out so that a layered edge is facing you (i.e. one of the edges with 3 exposed layers of dough). The dough will be rotated by 90º from when you first rolled and folded it. Repeat the process of rolling it out into a long, vertical rectangle, brushing off the excess flour, folding it, and chilling it two more times. (For rough puff, I find that three turns total is sufficient.) Refrigerate the dough, well wrapped, for at least an hour before using it. You can easily make this dough a day or two in advance, or even make and freeze it for use at some other point in time.
Make the filling
- In a small bowl, beat together the red miso paste, softened butter, and flour until it comes together in a smooth paste.
- Chop or tear the mushrooms into medium-sized pieces. Remember that they shrink down a good amount when cooked, so they don't have to be too tiny. Set aside. Finely chop the garlic cloves.
- Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat, and add the mushrooms, sautéeing until brown. Add the vinegar and toss with the mushrooms for a few moments. Transfer the mushrooms to a bowl. (Note: in order to brown the mushrooms, it's important not to overcrowd the pan—so work in batches if you need to.)
- Turn down the heat a tad and add the chopped garlic. Sautée until soft and fragrant. Add the miso-butter-flour paste and cook for about 2-3 minutes. Add the heavy cream while whisking vigorously, and cook until the sauce thickens. Add the cooked mushrooms and salt and pepper to taste, and stir for about 2 minutes longer to marry everything together. Remove from heat and cool to room temperature.
Assemble the turnovers
- Preheat the oven to 375º. Line another baking sheet with parchment paper.
- Retrieve the puff pastry from the fridge and roll out on a floured surface to 1/4 inch thickness. Using a 5 inch biscuit cutter, cut out 16 rounds. Roll out the middle section of each round to 1/8 inch thickness. You should end up with 16 ovals. Transfer the ovals to the baking sheet and chill for at least 20 minutes.
- Prepare an egg wash by whisking the egg with about 2 teaspoons of water.
- Once the rounds are chilled, remove them from the fridge. You may have to re-roll the rounds into ovals, as the gluten in the dough will shrink slightly while resting. Using a pastry brush, brush the outer inch of each oval with egg wash. Scoop about 1.5 tablespoons of the filling onto the top half of each oval round. Sprinkle each with about 1 T parmesan and 1/2 T of sliced scallions.
- Fold the lower half of the ovals up over the filling and press down to seal the edges. Brush the tops of the turnovers with egg wash, and place in the freezer for ~10 minutes. Repeat the egg wash-freezing cycle 2 more times. Try to avoid getting egg wash on the cut edge of the pastry, as this will hinder the rise. The goal here is to get a substantial coating of egg wash, which will help your pastries brown beautifully.
- After the last freezing cycle, use a sharp paring knife to make shallow decorative slashes on the turnovers. If the slashes are too deep, you can create weak spots in the pastry that may lead to bursting. Finally, puncture one hole through the top of the turnover using either a skewer or your paring knife and sprinkle the top with some more parmesan. Bake for ~25 minutes, or until the turnover is puffed and a deep golden-brown. ∎
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