Dried porcini mushrooms—the old Sunshine Grocery stocked them in bulk in glass jars for about $5.99/ounce. The last time I bought porcini, at a well-known, hyphenated food-and-cookware store, the price was $24 per ounce.
Aleksey's Market, 718 Thompson Lane, recently added dried porcini to its shelves. Foraged wild mushrooms are essential to Russian cooks, and Russians have been eating porcini a long time, under the Latin name boletus. The jar of porcini at Aleksey's is labeled "boletus edulis and related group," so there are some non-porcini boletus in there.
Because of that, I waited until I tried them before reporting, because what if they were mostly "other" mushrooms? I can report that they are porcini flavored through and through—and just as happily, that a 1.76-ounce jar runs about $11.
