Try One Of Goa’s Monsoon Mushroom Recipes, The

Olmi Rava Fry

Recipe

Monsoon mushroom recipes in Goa feature a wild mushroom called ‘olmi’, combined with Konkan special rava fry for a delicious snack you can eat as an appetiser as well. The freshly harvested wild mushrooms are washed and coated in the typical Goan marinade of turmeric, Kashmiri red chilli, ginger-garlic paste, tamarind pulp or white vinegar, and salt. This paste is rubbed into each mushroom cap and stem, then left to rest for at least 20 minutes. Just before frying, the marinated mushrooms are coated in rava or semolina and shallow fried. But what makes this mushroom recipe so unique? It is this mushroom’s growth conditions. They are a species of Termitomyces, a genus of edible fungi that grows in a unique symbiotic relationship with termites. They sprout only during the rains from the sacred termite mounds found in the forested areas of Valpoi, Sattari, and Canacona in Goa's Western Ghats. They are available for roughly two weeks, from late July to early August, and cannot be cultivated commercially, which makes this recipe worth trying. The Termitomyces species has a firm, meaty texture and a terrific, earthy flavour with an umami quality distinct from that of the cultivated button or oyster mushrooms available year-round. In Goa, olmi is traditionally cooked as xacuti, tondak, or a masala fry. In Karnataka, where the same mushrooms grow across the Western Ghats border, a rava-fried version is a typical preparation as the mushrooms' firm flesh holds up to the shallow fry without collapsing, and their flavour is amplified by the Goan-style masala.