Cooking your shrooms

If you’re looking to saute, you’ve got a few options: dry, wet, or a little oil.

Dry: I know this sounds weird, but just add your mushrooms into a dry pan. Those mushrooms are holding a lot of water, so as they cook and their moisture-holding structures collapse, the water will come out and add moisture to the pan. When they’re looking mostly cooked, add a little oil to the pan (along with any alliums or spices). The cooked mushrooms won’t absorb oil like raw mushrooms will, so the oil will coat the outside of the shrooms and more of it will stay in the pan to cook your garlic.

Wet: Another odd but solid method: add a little water to your pan at the beginning of cooking instead of oil. It gives you some moisture in the pan to work with and will feel more like sauteing with oil, but you don’t have to worry about the mushrooms absorbing it. If they soak up the water, they’ll just release it as the cook. You can also add another splash of water as you’re cooking and cover the pan with a lid to steam it a bit. I like doing this to let me mushrooms cook longer and get more tender without risking them drying out. When they’re looking cooked, take off the lid, cook off any excess water, then add a little oil to the pan, toss to coat, and add your other ingredients.

A little oil: This is pretty much just classic sauteing in oil with a couple caveats. Because of mushrooms’ absorbancy, you should try to distribute the oil over all the mushrooms fast, so you don’t end up with just one mushroom soaking up all the oil. You can try adding the oil to the pan, then adding the shrooms and tossing. Or you can toss the shrooms in a prep bowl beforehand. (A little oil can be nice to help seasoning stick to the shrooms. But be prepared that the mushrooms might pull the oil out of the pan fast, and you’re back to a dry pan. Just don’t keep adding oil—a little oil is nice, too much oil is too much.)

Whichever method you go with I tend to try to preheat the pan on medium, get a sear on the shrooms before tossing them, add alliums and spices in the last stretch, and then deglaze if needed. However, each method brings a different wrinkle to this. You might want a lower temp when dry frying to avoid burning. It can be hard to get nice color on the shrooms when cooking with water. And I’ve mentioned the worries of too much oil already. But despite this, mushrooms tend to be pretty forgiving, so please feel encouraged to mess around with these different methods and get the feel for them.

And on the other hand, you might not want to saute at all; you might be looking to roast. My rule of thumb is too cook at 400 for about 25 minutes in an uncrowded pan. Depending on the variety you’re cooking or how you’ve cut up the pieces, 20 minutes might be better, or maybe 425 is more on the money. But whatever the numbers end up being, you should be looking for tender mushrooms with crispy edges.

favorite recipes

Here are a few favorite recipes we’ve cooked. We can’t take credit for them, but you should still eat them.

We also have a few recipes of our own that we’ve been tinkering with on our Recipes page.