Mushroom advice

[mrissa]

So last night I made some stuffed mushrooms, and the stuffing was pretty good, but the mushrooms themselves came out a little weird. (The stuffing was kalamata olives, sun-dried tomatoes, rosemary, and garlic pulsed in the food processor, with goat cheese crumblies on the top.) They were kind of leathery on the outside. Does anybody have any advice on how to make stuffed mushrooms come out with a better texture than that? I just oiled the pan and plunked the mushrooms down on it.

Anyway there's leftover filling to stick in one of the gajillion pitas with the rest of the goat cheese for somebody's lunch, so that's a thing. The grocery curse is looking particularly bad this week: how can we need groceries on Tuesday when markgritter just bought all the food in the world on Saturday? Howwww? Oh, Great-Grandma, the curse you passed to me! If only there was a way to turn pitas into orange juice--forget this lead/gold stuff.

Comments

[themagdalen.livejournal.com]

Did you run them under the broiler, or in a slow oven or what? I think that might make the difference, though I'm not sure in which direction.

Marinating the mushrooms first might help too, but that sounds like a lot of work.

Mmmmm, sundried tomatoes.

[tournevis.livejournal.com]

Broiler. Pre-roast them a bit. Or pan-fry them a bit.

Also, the salt in the stuffing will make them render their water. That too will make them rubbery.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, and there's no way around that with the olives--I didn't add any extra salt, but the olives certainly have enough of their own. So maybe the broiler. Yah.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Slow oven; I will try the broiler next time.

[sam-t.livejournal.com]

Brush with oil, probably. Other alternatives include cooking faster or using fresher mushrooms.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

The oil-brushing was what I did the one time I attempted stuffed mushrooms. The stuffing was not entirely successful, but the mushrooms came out fine.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest olive oil as well. I had (have, but it's in storage now) a refillable olive-oil sprayer bottle that's really good for stuff like this. I miss it.

[the_rck]

I've not tried making stuffed mushrooms, but my experience is that I need to take steps to keep mushrooms from drying out in heat. Wrapping in foil works. Immersing in fluid works. Anything that holds in steam or replaces lost water will help.

When I do crockpot cooking, I always have to add the mushrooms late, after everything else is hot, or to put them on the bottom. Otherwise they shrivel. I suspect that cooking them separately would help, too.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Oh, noes! The grocery curse strikes again! *wail*

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

THIS POST ISN'T ABOUT THE ELECTION YOU NAZI!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure it is. Symbolically. The goat cheese symbolizes the Fourth Estate.

Don't you have a degree in this stuff?

[seabream.livejournal.com]

I too would advise coating the mushrooms in oil and cooking them at a higher temperature for a shorter period. That said, depending on whether you want the garlic to lose it's sharpness or not, you may want to pre-cook it a bit before adding it to the filling. Given that the presumably uncooked leftover filling will probably end up on pitas, I'd guess it not to be a big issue. Then too there's also the possibility of trying out different kinds of mushrooms. What kind did you use? Short wide ones with less direct exposure to air might yield different results.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

They were specifically sold as stuffing mushrooms: short wide ones.

[seabream.livejournal.com]

Well that's neat. I don't think that I've seen mushrooms sold as such before. Portobello? Buttons that just grew in that shape?

Related but off topic because they're unsuited for the kind of stuffed mushrooms you're trying for, I wonder if I could get something like an inside-out ravioli if I gently stir fried straw mushrooms with their pouches filled with a starch (something already cooked, like crumbled crackers), cheese and herb mixture. For that matter, I wonder how difficult they'd be to stuff considering how small they are and how slippery they are when they come out of the can. They're one of my favourite mushrooms.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Buttons; they may have sorted the buttons.

I'd be astonished at canned straw mushrooms large and sturdy enough to stuff. The sturdy part is non-trivial: remove the stem, and you haven't much left of the straw mushroom structurally. I'm not saying it's impossible. But I'd be very impressed.

[seabream.livejournal.com]

Well I wasn't thinking of removing the stem beyond where the cap curls back to meet them. Er, I'm talking about the unpeeled variety (http://www.mssf.org/cookbook/straw.html) that look like these. If or when I were going to do it, I'd give some thought to the composition of the stuffing as a structural element. For a first effort, I'd be trying for something just about as hard as I could put through a pastry bag with a fairly sharp nozzle, that would remain stiff through cooking. Though the caps have very low bending resistance, they aren't very stretchy. With the stem mostly closing the hole through the cap, and the filling ballooning out the cap around the midpoint (sort of like a pressure stabilized structure with a narrow ring shaped hole at the bottom) the gap around the stem should be narrow enough to keep the stuffing, which should end up roughly the shape of a pitted olive, in. As to the size, well, I figure that stuffed mushrooms are kind of a special effort food to begin with, and I definitely have moods when I'm suited for finicky repetitive tasks. (http://www.chinagreensource.com/Canned-Straw-Mushroom.html) ()

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yep, I was clear on what straw mushrooms are.

Ah. The stuffed mushrooms I made last week were extremely low-effort. The hardest part--I assume, since I didn't do this part myself, markgritter did--was washing the blade of the food processor without cutting oneself.

[seabream.livejournal.com]

Well I'm glad one of us was. I hadn't known that the peeled variety, which I probably wouldn't try stuffing (unless I was able to think of a good substrate to cook them on and keep them upright, which is challenging because I'm told that they don't turn out well steamed, baked or without significant amounts of oil), existed until I went looking for pictures of straw mushrooms to make sure that I had the English name right. When I think 'straw' and 'mushroom', the first sensory recall bundle to come to mind is the one which should correspond to enoki. And then I thought I was wrong because they didn't look like the ones I was thinking of. When it comes to Asian fungi, or really a lot of foodstuffs, my experience might be reasonably wide, but getting to eat a given thing again depends on my being able to describe it to (usually) my mother since I often don't know what the proper name is.

Low effort with good results is good. I seldom achieve it, but I admire it in those who do.

[hbevert.livejournal.com]

Mmmm, sounds like a yummy stuffing! I find that if the stuffing has some wet and not too salty things in it, like cheese and leafy herbs and lightly sauteed onions or vegetables that still have water in them, the mushrooms end up moister. Also, I think my favorite recipe for them has them baking at a fairly high heat (375 degrees), thereby giving up a lot of moisture to the pan at once and simmering in that liquid.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. So in some ways fresh tomatoes might be better than sun-dried for this purpose, but on the other hand I'm not sure the flavor could stand up to the olives as well. Hmmmmmmm.