Dutch Oven Mushrooms & Asparagus
I first had this dish when I took the Dutch Oven Cooking class from from Kent Mayberry through the Canyons School District continuing education. Kent was 1999 World Dutch Oven Cookoff champion. If you’re new to dutch oven cooking, I highly recommend his class. I liked it so much that I took it twice. He teaches how you can have great foods from the very simple to the incredibly complex.
Below is my rough adaptation of the recipe for Zac’s birthday dinner. For the award winning version, I recommend Kent’s cookbook, American West Dutch Oven Cooking. The stuffing recipe is the bomb! And sometime I need to try the Crown Roast recipe!
Ingredients:
- 1/2 cube butter
- 1 spoonful minced garlic (I used bottled garlic)
- 1 1/2 onions, sliced into rings
- white mushrooms – 1 large package
- brown mushrooms – 1 large package
- better than boullion – beef flavor – 1-2 large spoonfuls
- 1 package of asparagus (mine was a Costco package, so probably equivalent to about 2 grocery store bundles.)
- 1 lemon
For this dinner I used my “Big Bertha” dutch oven. It’s a 15 in. deep-style and weighs in at 33 lbs. empty.
I also used a dutch oven liner for easier cleanup. It was smaller than Bertha, so I just pressed it down into the pan and flattened it out a bit so the bottom of the liner fit the size of the dutch oven.
Food Preparation:
Remove all the stems from the mushrooms, and place the stems in one bowl, and the caps in another bowl.
To prep the apparatus cut or break off the woody portion.
Cooking:
I began by warming the dutch oven by setting my coals up using the ring method.
Spray the dutch oven liner with non-stick cooking spray.
Add butter, onion and garlic to dutch oven and saute.
Arrange all the mushroom caps on the bottom of the dutch oven, stem-side-up. Mine had enough mushrooms that I needed to add a second layer of caps.
Once you’ve placed all the caps, add the stems on top
Cover and cook to release moisture from the mushrooms (about 8-10 min?)
Add better than bouillon and stir.
Cover and let cook another 10ish minutes.
- Recipe Adaptation for Keto:
Normally you would thicken the gravy at this point using a corn starch slurry, but I left that part out to make it more keto friendly.
Add Asparagus
Cover and cook for about 8-10 minutes (reduce heat below and add more heat to the top)
Squeeze lemons onto asparagus
Place the squeezed lemons on the asparagus as a garnish
Serve