Appetizer, as you know, can be not only cold, but also hot. A classic example of such a dish is julienne, without which today no large restaurant feast can do. How to cook this simple, but at the same time unusually tender and tasty recipe at home based on ordinary mushrooms, is described step by step below.

Selection and preparation of ingredients

It’s worth starting with the fact that with the term “julienne” (or “julienne” - depending on the chosen transcription), there is a real confusion among housewives and even professional chefs. It is believed that the dish is of French origin, although in reality this is not entirely true.

Did you know? In French cuisine, the word "julienne" does not mean an independent dish, but only the technology of cutting vegetables with very small straws, which allows you to cook soups and sauces from them as quickly as possible. According to one version, the term comes from the nameof his month juillet (July), since the ripening abundance of vegetables during this period allows them to be chopped and cooked quickly and finely, in another way, from the female name popular in France.

Thus, French julienne is either a salad or a soup of fresh vegetables, ground in a special way. In Slavic cuisine, this term is usually called a hot appetizer of boiled chicken or mushrooms, sprinkled with white sauce (cooked on the basis of sour cream, cream or milk) under a crispy cheese crust, baked in a special portioned bowl - cocotte, in which the dish is served.

When preparing the “Russian” variation of champignon julienne, several culinary secrets should be kept in mind, mainly regarding the choice of mushrooms themselves. The problem is that champignons, sold in stores and supermarkets and used by cooks and housewives, are grown artificially - in bags or crates. Such mushrooms are absolutely safe from the point of view of potential poisoning, but at the same time they are practically devoid of a bright taste and a characteristic mushroom smell.

Important! Forest champignon has a deadly double - pale grebe. At a young age, these species are very difficult to distinguish, so even experienced mushroom pickers prefer to bypass small and single mushrooms that look like mushrooms.

In order to make the dish truly refined and aromatic, you can:

• cook it from a natural productacquired from professional mushroom pickers: meadow champignon (agarius campestris) is one of the most delicious mushrooms growing in the temperate zone, and the dishes prepared from it are simply divine;
• add at least a few dry porcini mushrooms to raw champignons: they must first be soaked in a small amount of water, then cut and mix with chopped champignons. Pour boletus soaked in water into the pan immediately after adding flour to the pan - this is how the appetizer absorbs all the mushroom aroma concentrated in dried porcini mushrooms;
• if there is no access to forest mushrooms - choose the largest mushrooms for julienne, weighing at least 35 grams each, since it is in them, as experienced chefs say, that the maximum amount of taste and aroma has time to accumulate (small mushrooms make sense to buy for those recipes where they are used in their entire form, for example, for pickling).

The most delicious dishes of one or another national cuisine tend to come to other countries and become very popular, while often changing their “original” composition and taste almost beyond recognition. In addition to the traditional New Year's olivier, which is referred to all over the world as “Russian salad”, Julien, who is a soup in France and a portioned hot snack in Russia, was an example of such a strange transformation. But it’s worth trying this delicate dish, which, moreover, can be prepared at home with your own hands in just a few minutes, using affordable and inexpensive products — and I don’t want to talk about the historical intricacies of its origin.