Smoked Mushroom Garum Recipe

The smoked mushroom garum from Noma Projects is an awesome plant-based way to boost umami in dishes from lasagna to ramen. I highly recommend it. No wonder Noma chose this sauce as the first item to showcase Noma outside its doors.

But one bottle is around $40 with shipping, and making it yourself takes a few months. So I engineered my own take on the recipe that takes a fraction of the time and tastes just as good (in my humble opinion!).

Noma’s smoked mushroom garum is delicious. It’s made by blending cremini mushrooms, koji, and salt; letting that ferment for 6-8 weeks; straining then cold-smoking the remaining liquid. I highly recommend purchasing it to experience a tiny slice of the magic of Noma at home.

But let’s say you want to save money. Let’s say don’t have 6-8 weeks. Let’s say you don’t even have koji! This recipe is for you. And having taste-tested the two together, I can say it is just as good (albeit not exactly the same).

Introducing my SMOKED MUSHROOM GARUM

I sought to replicate the Noma smoked mushroom garum in a fraction of the time using two hacks: one for expedited fermentation and another for expedited aging:

1. Expedited fermentation: Noma uses koji to ferment their garum, but I use pork pancreas instead. The enzymes in pork pancreas are much stronger than the enzymes in koji, so they get the job done in a fraction of the time and and impart no discernible taste. Even better, powdered, freeze-dried pork pancreas is sold as a dietary supplement, so it is easy to acquire and inexpensive. If you’d rather keep this plant-based, please try this and let me know how it goes!

2. Expedited aging: Noma ages their garum for 6-8 weeks at 140ºF, but I’ve found that aging is actually a flavor you can add to sauces. In other words, I outsource my aging! Blending the garum with blackened koji or even store-bought black garlic will simulate the aging process in a fraction of the time.

All together, you can make this in just a couple days (including the process of clarifying the garum).

What you need

You can scale this recipe for any amount of sauce.

1. Pork pancreas supplements. I use these, but you’re welcome to try other options too. One bottle contains enough protease to make many, many gallons of sauce. See my post here on a deep-dive. For vegan options, try this and let me know how it goes, or splurge on a big order of Flavourzyme via Alibaba.

2. Mushroom of your choice to smoke. About one pound. My friend gifted me some foraged morels to make this recipe, but you could use any mushrooms of your choice.

3. Cremini mushrooms. About four pounds. These will make up most of the liquid of the sauce.

4. Blackened koji. Or store-bought black garlic. 10% of the weight of the smoked mushroom.

5. Sous vide device: In this recipe, you need to cook the mushrooms at a very specific temperature for three hours. Sous vide devices (i.e. immersion circulators) are great at keeping food at specific temperatures for a long period of time.

6. Kitchen scales: You need one scale that measures to the gram and one that measures to the 100th of a gram.

7. Device to smoke the mushrooms: I used an ibushi gin donabe to smoke the morels for my recipe, but you could use any smoker. If you’d rather more control of the final smokiness, you could alternatively buy a cold-smoker and smoke the finished sauce instead of what I do in the recipe below.

You also need salt, a blender, and a fine mesh strainer.

Instructions

*Cremini mushrooms before roasting overnight*

Prepare the roasted mushroom juice:
1. Wash 4 lb of cremini mushrooms.
2. Put them into a pot with a lid.
3. Put the pot in the oven overnight at 170ºF or as low as your oven will go.
4. In the morning, you find the roasted mushrooms in a pool of mushroom juice that has been extracted from the mushrooms.
5. Strain the juice and reserve.
6. Blend the remaining mushrooms and squeeze them through a nut milk bag or cheesecloth to collect the rest of the juice.
Prepare the smoked mushrooms: I smoked my morel mushrooms in my ibushi gin donable for about 30 minutes. But you can smoke whatever mushrooms you wish in any method you choose. If you don’t have a smoker, you could try this method I have used in the past to smoke fish.
Prepare the smoked mushroom garum:
1. Combine 2 parts roasted mushroom juice by weight and 1 part smoked mushroom by weight in a blender.
2. Add 10% of the mushroom’s weight in blackened koji or black garlic to the blender.
3. Remove freeze-dried pancreas powder from the pill capsules by pulling them apart. Add 1% of the smoked mushroom weight in powder to the blender. Blend briefly, then transfer the sludgy result to a freezer ziploc bag.
4. Cook the sludge at 140ºF for about 3 hours, agitating it periodically to ensure it is well-mixed. You’ll notice that much of the sludge becomes completely liquified by the enzymes within 30 minutes.
Strain and reserve the liquid.

The end result of this process will be a very cloudy liquid. If you want to achieve a sauce that looks more like a traditional soy sauce with a more focused flavor, you’ll need to clarify it. To do so:

Freeze the sauce until totally solid. I freeze mine in ice cube trays.
Transfer the frozen sauce to a fine strainer placed over a container in the fridge. As the sauce defrosts over a couple days, clear liquid will strain into the container while leaving the impurities in the strainer above.

PRESERVING YOUR Garum

Unlike a traditional garum, this sauce isn't preserved yet. There are many methods for preserving your sauce, but the most obvious method is to add salt. You should do this step after clarifying.

It’s difficult to recommend the exact salt level necessary to preserve a sauce without measuring its water activity, but I added 10% to this recipe and it has faired just fine while in the fridge.

More to explore

If you liked this recipe, there’s a whole world of garums to explore. Learn more.