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Monday, January 9, 2012

Cooking Tip: How to Care for Mushrooms

Holy moly, has it ever been a while! Well, never fear, for I am back (for now!) with another useful tip for the kitchen.

So, true or false: you buy mushrooms at the store, you pop them in the fridge in their plastic container and when you're ready to use them you take them out and eat them as they are.

If you selected "true," then you should read this post!

Mushrooms should never ever ever be stored in their original container. I was very bad and bought mushrooms the yesterday and put them in the fridge without changing the container and even in the past 24 hours, some of the mushrooms have gotten mushy in some spots.

The best environment for mushrooms is in the fridge in a brown paper bag. They need to breathe! However, they shouldn't be stored for too long because they tend to take on the odors of the fridge since they are so porous.

So, now you've taken your mushrooms out of the brown paper bag you put them in when you got home from the grocery store and you pop one in your mouth or in your stir-fry or on your pizza without batting an eyelash... right? WRONG!

Look:
See that mushroom? See those little brown spots? You may think that that's just part of the mushroom because even white mushrooms aren't perfectly white. Well, you're right about white mushrooms not being perfectly white, but not all those spots are supposed to be there! That's right, folks, some of them are....



dirt!

So, what do you do? Well, it's very simple. First you run the mushroom under cool water and rub it gently. The dirt should wash away easily. You might have to work a little harder at mushrooms you bought bulk (not American bulk, which is called "wholesale" in Canada, but Canadian bulk, which means that you picked which mushrooms you wanted and put them in the bag yourself, as opposed to the pre-packaged ones).


Then you pat the mushrooms dry with a paper towel and let them hang out with some of their mushroom buddies until you're ready to use them!

See? Easy peasy!

2 comments:

Vanessa Bartlemus said...

Love the tip to put them in a brown paper bag! Never knew that. :) But yeah I'm obssessive about washing my mushrooms...then I have to wipe them dry till there's no more "slipperiness" to them.

erin said...

good tip! i never knew. i always buy sliced mushrooms though

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