To Brush or to Wash?
Generally speaking, the best mushrooms are fresh mushrooms. Refrigerate as soon as you get home, and don’t wash until you’re ready to prepare or process them.
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Caption
Keep fresh mushrooms in the fridge in paper or waxed paper bags, never plastic, as they need to breathe. Plastic bags will yield mush rather than mushrooms.
Objective:
Storage/Prep
Total Time:
Varies
Suggested Mushrooms:
See code
Equipment and/or Ingredients
May you be fortunate enough to find sufficient mushrooms for dinner and then some! (Found bucketloads while on a foray? See Collection Ethics and Etiquette.)
Method
Brushing: One school of thought is that one must never get mushrooms wet, as this will dilute their flavor. Advocates instead carefully trim and brush their fungi clean. This can be achieved with a pristine bolete, but you’ll be crunching on grit if you try it with a mud puppy chanterelle!
Washing: Another perspective is that fungi absorb a negligible amount of water from washing, and that subsequent cooking will drive off the moisture along with that already present in the mushroom (they’re 90% water).
Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking, a wonderful exploration of food chemistry and taste, did an experiment: He weighed 252 grams of fresh mushrooms, submerged them in water for 5 minutes, then removed them, blotted dry and weighed again. They then weighed 258 grams, 23 mushrooms having absorbed less than half a tablespoon among them. So he now rinses for 5 or 10 seconds with no compunctions.
You can make up your own mind.