Japan’s trendy eringi mushroom pasta recipe: As eye-catching as it is labor-intensive 【Photos】

The recipe calls for meticulously sticking dry noodles into numerous mushroom stalks. Uppercutting the entire dish into the atmosphere out of sheer frustration at the difficulty of that step is, we presume, optional.

The eringi mushroom isn’t native to Japan, but is still an extraordinarily popular addition to many Japanese dishes. When cooked properly, it’s meaty and juicy and full of umami. It’s also one of the more tough and fibrous mushrooms out there.

So, naturally, we stumbled across a recipe that calls for sticking a bunch of fragile, uncooked spaghetti sticks through countless chopped pieces of eringi, all because the finished product looks kind of cute and creative.

This recipe has been making the rounds of the Japanese Twitterverse, though it became immediately clear, upon trying for ourselves, that the exceedingly fragile pasta sticks are prone to breaking until you’ve developed the muscle memory to punch the sticks through the thick cuts of eringi without crushing them into useless shards. There was really no culinary reason for proceeding with this particular step, outside of the visual novelty, but we’re nothing if not determined, so starting this project meant finishing it.

From there, it’s a simple matter of boiling the pasta and eringi together in a pot. Happily, both items boil to perfection in around the same time, bringing your total preparation time, inclusive of the mushroom skewering, to around a fortnight – long after your elderly neighbor has noticed the unread newspapers piling up on your front porch and alerted the authorities that you might be dead in there.

After the cops have left, shaking their heads and assuring your neighbor you’re very much alive and are just doing “some kind of weird mushroom stuff,” the most common recipe leaves you free to top your pasta and eringi mushroom with whatever sauce you prefer. That sauce will almost certainly end up being something premade that you pour out of a jar because, seriously, who wants to take the time to prepare a sauce from scratch after spending the last decade painstakingly stabbing dry noodles into mushroom chunks?

Our Japanese reporter who tasted the dish had no particular problem with the overall flavor after topping it with a simple packaged meat sauce, but we found a few flaws with this recipe.

One is that eringi, being naturally chewy and tough, are sliced into thin strips in almost every preparation to make their texture more palatable, so just hacking them into a bunch of rough hunks produces an effect similar to gnawing on an old tire. Secondly, there’s no noticeable difference between this labor-intensive preparation and just boiling a bunch of slices of eringi in the same pot as some spaghetti noodles, save for the fact that this technique calls for an active preparation time roughly equivalent to, “Until scenes from Mad Max: Fury Road are literally happening outside of your window.”

Overall, we give this popular Japanese Interwebs recipe a 5 out of 10. The presentation is novel and preparing the dish might be a fun afternoon activity if you manage to recruit your entire family and surrounding neighborhood for the task, but the massive eringi chunks actively detract from the overall dish and would probably taste better if simply sliced thinly and added into a standard pot of boiling pasta.

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