SC - mushrooms

[Nanna Rognvaldardottir]

Jehanne said:

>I have to disagree with this. I cook mushrooms on a weekly basis, and have
>never had any problems with button mushrooms soaking up liquid when they
>were washed. Call me lazy, but if I'm cleaning several pounds of mushrooms,
>I'm not going to wipe them one by one with a cloth.


I agree with you. Harold McGee also did a study on this and he says (in The
Curious Cook):
"To test the lore, I weighed out 252 grams of fresh mushrooms on a postal
scale, submerged them in tap water for 5 minutes, blotted the surface
moisture, and reweighed them. The mushrooms now weighed 258 grams, which
meant that 23 mushrooms had absorbed less than half a tablespoon among them,
or a sixteenth of a teaspoon each. That´s after 5 minutes of soaking. It
takes me 5 or 10 seconds to rinse a mushroom, which I now do without the
hint of a second thought."

I always wash mushrooms (they are around 90% water anyway, so what harm
could 1/16 of a teaspoon do?) and I´ve never noted any loss of flavor. I
think this wiping-not-washing is mostly an American thing (although I may be
wrong there); I´ve asked dozens of European chefs and none of them
recommended wiping the mushrooms.

Nanna