Simmering Your Broth

• The first step in making a mushroom consomme is preparing a good, strongly flavored mushroom broth. You can use any mushrooms you have, from white button mushrooms to mammoth portobellos or dried wild morels and porcini. Use the tip of a small spoon to scoop the gills out of your mushrooms before you start, because they'll make it dark and unattractive. Saute the mushrooms briefly in butter with onions or shallots, and then add water. Add other aromatic ingredients to taste, such as celery, carrots, peppercorns or fresh thyme. Simmer the mushrooms for about an hour, until the broth has absorbed their flavors, then strain and chill it.

The Clarification

• You could theoretically make your broth extra-clear by straining it through endless layers of cheesecloth or coffee filters, but that's inefficient. The classical technique lets the soup do its own work. Pour your well-chilled mushroom broth into a tall, narrow pot. Saute some extra mushrooms, then whisk them together with egg whites and an acidic ingredient such as diced tomatoes or a splash of lemon juice. Pour this mixture into your broth, and gently heat it up. The egg whites and other ingredients will float to the top, forming a nasty-looking "raft." This is what clarifies your broth.

Gone Rafting

• When you stir the egg whites and other ingredients into your broth, the egg proteins disperse throughout the liquid. As it heats, the proteins begin to set as they would in a boiled egg. Because they're diluted by mushroom broth, they make a big, spongy mess instead of a compact egg white. The broth filters through that mesh of egg-white bubbles, which strain out sediment, debris and impurities. As your pot simmers, the broth becomes progressively clearer and the raft becomes correspondingly dirtier. Clarification removes some flavor along with those impurities, but the extra mushrooms you added along with the egg whites will compensate for that.

Finishing Up

• Once the broth is perfectly clear you can push the raft aside, and carefully ladle out your mushroom consomme. Usually you'll get a few floating bits from the raft, so filter it through a coffee filter or cheesecloth to remove those. Your consomme will be perfectly clear but a light golden brown, like a delicate cup of tea. Enjoy it just as it is, served hot in small cups, as an appetizer before your main meal. Alternatively, garnish it with finely julienned strips of sauteed mushroom or wild mushroom, tiny strips of duck or venison, or even previously cooked wild rice. All of those garnishes complement the earthy mushroom flavor.