Scaloppine ai funghi 

(Escalopes with mushrooms)

Escalopes with mushrooms the second autumn dish par excellence, a recipe easy and quick to prepare, a classic when the mushroom season begins because it is one of the most popular dishes of the Italian culinary tradition. The escalopes with mushrooms you can make them with any type of mushroom. Obviously they are much better with porcini mushrooms but also with mixed mushrooms they will be very good and, why not, even with frozen mushrooms they will be excellent. Remember that escalopes are both fine slices of beef and or veal (if you also want chicken but they must be well beaten) but I always prefer veal because they remain softer and more tender. Choose the meat you prefer and start reading the ingredients and the procedure for making escalopes with mushrooms!

And now...

Well, fasten your apron...!

Ingredients

800 g veal slices

500 g mushrooms

2 garlic cloves

Half a glass of white wine

5 spoons of brown sauce

flour 

extra virgin olive oil

salt

Pepper

Preparation

The best meat to buy to make escalopes with mushrooms are veal slices but beef slices or alternatively slices of chicken breast cut thin and beaten with the meat tenderizer are also fine. You can use both porcini mushrooms and a mixture of mushrooms of various qualities.

You can use fresh mushrooms or frozen mushrooms. If you use fresh mushrooms, clean them by scraping them off the earth with a small knife or rubbing them with a clean cloth but NEVER pass them under water. If you use frozen mushrooms, cook them in a pan with oil and garlic directly from frozen and over high heat for 15 minutes until all the liquid has dried. Take the slices of meat you have chosen and beat them well with the meat mallet so that they become very thin. Pass the slices of meat entirely in the flourand shake off the excess. Put in a large pan 4 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil and let them heat together with the garlic cloves cut in half and deprived of the central soul then cook the mushrooms (frozen or fresh cleaned and cut into pieces as explained above). Cook the mushrooms over high heat for about 15 minutes, stirring continuously and adding a little salt and finish cooking. Remove the mushrooms from the pan and keep them aside. In the same pan where you cooked the mushrooms, add a little extra virgin olive oil and let it heat. Cook the floured slices of meat over high heat for a few minutes on both sides then salt slightly, blend with brown sauce and white wine. Add the previously cooked mushrooms and let the escalopes finish cooking with mushrooms for a few more minutes. Season with salt only if necessary, add pepper if you want and serve the escalopes with hot mushrooms.

VARIANTS AND TIPS

You can use veal, beef or chicken. If you want you can use fresh or frozen mushrooms. If you want you can not put the pepper and you can finish the recipe with fresh chopped parsley at the end of cooking.

You can deglaze only with water instead of white wine but the escalopes with mushrooms will be less tasty.

The brown sauce is the secret of the chefs to prepare dishes with an intense and unforgettable flavor. Have you ever wondered how the dishes cooked at the restaurant have a particular aftertaste that you can never replicate at home? This secret is precisely the brown sauce. It is certainly the most intense and tasty sauce that you will have in the kitchen, the best friend of all chefs and is the basis of many dishes of the French gastronomic tradition, but also Canadian and Italian. But let's see together what it is, how it is prepared and how to use the brown sauce in the kitchen. The brown veal bottom can be purchased in stores specializing in catering products. But you can safely prepare it in the kitchen at home. I don't want to lie to you, you have to arm yourself with time and patience and it's definitely not a sauce to prepare every day. But in view of the holidays you can prepare in large quantities and keep the brown bottom sauce as you would with the classic meat broth: pour it into ice trays and leave it in the freezer until ready to use it. In the kitchen the brown sauce is used to give a particular flavor to dishes and enrich them with an intense and deep aroma. Once you have frozen it and it is ready for any eventuality, you are already halfway through the work. You can use the brown sauce to enrich a dish of mushroom veal or to prepare an excellent risotto creamed with a brown sauce.

Why prepare it?

The brown sauce, is a sauce that is prepared with the bones of animals. The bones are put to cook first in the oven with vegetables, and then in water with spices and tomato. At the end of cooking, the sauce is filtered and ready to be used or stored. It is important to use the bones of young animals such as those of the calf because these bones are richer in collagen. The collagen contained in the bones during slow cooking turns into gelatin which gives the brown sauce a more velvety and dense texture. This sauce is perfect to accompany roasts with an intense flavor, whatever the side dish you have chosen. The role of the brown sauce in the kitchen is that of flavor and flavor corrector. Do not make the mistake of salting the sauce, you can add pepper at the end of cooking.

The ingredients to prepare the brown sauce are:

2 kg of calf bones

200 g carrots

300 g onions

1 stalk of celery

3 fresh tomatoes

1 clove of garlic

4 liters of cold water

nutmeg

cinnamon

cloves

salt

How to prepare the brown veal sauce

Once you've recovered all the ingredients for your brown sauce, let's get to work.

Cut the veal bones and put them on a baking sheet and bake at 200°C until dark. Remember to stir them from time to time. Clean carrots, celery and onion, cut everything into coarse pieces, adding the vegetables and garlic to the toasted bones in the oven and continuing cooking for about twenty minutes. Once this time has elapsed, take everything out of the oven and put the contents of the pan in a pot full of water. Add tomatoes and spices and bring everything to a boil. Degrease the water by removing any impurities that will rise to the surface with a slotted spoon. Now put a lid on it and continue cooking over very low heat for 5 hours. Continue to check the pot: if the water should fall below the level of the bones, pour some more. When cooked, filter the contents of the pot through a fine-meshed strainer and you will have obtained your brown sauce. Now you are free to use it immediately or store it by freezing it in ice molds.