Most of us know where we are with button mushrooms – they are inoffensive, bland and fairly sturdy. You can stick them in a stew or a tomato sauce, or fling them across the top of a pizza without worrying about how much cooking is required or how long they have been drying out in the fridge. But nobody gets excited about them.
“I haven’t cooked a button mushroom for a very long time,” says Jeremy Lee, chef proprietor at Quo Vadis and the author of Cooking: Simply and Well, For One or Many. “But they’re perfectly lovely – they’ll make you a decent omelette and they seem to be inextricably linked with the great British fry-up.”
Increasingly, however, we are spoilt for choice when it comes to fungi. Supermarkets have long stocked an array of “exotic” or “woodland” mushrooms, often in mixed packs: shiitake, of course, but also maitake, enoki, oyster and king oyster. In season, speciality shops stock a range of fresh wild mushrooms, including girolle and chanterelle, while cultivated versions can be bought all year round.
This is great news for cooks, particularly vegans or vegetarians looking to broaden their range, or omnivores trying to reduce their reliance on meat. But all that variety can be bewildering. Even the names seem almost deliberately deceptive, especially when you discover that chicken of the woods and hen of the woods are two different mushrooms, but hen of the woods and maitake are the same thing.
So how do you select, store and cook such a wide and seasonally shifting array?
When choosing mushrooms, freshness should be your main concern. “Freshness is vital,” says Lee. “As soon as they’re cut, they begin to either rot or desiccate. So, a firm stem.”
A mushroom in decent condition will keep for a few days in a paper bag in the crisper drawer of your fridge, but when it comes to storing fresh mushrooms, perhaps the best advice is: don’t.
“If you’re buying really good mushrooms, I would say eat them straight away,” says Adele Nozedar, food writer and author of The Hedgerow Handbook and Foraging with Kids.
Generally, you shouldn’t rinse a mushroom, or even get it wet. “Most chefs will not wash a mushroom, because it will absorb moisture,” says Gary Bebbington, technical manager of Smithy Mushrooms, which supplies UK-grown exotic mushrooms to restaurants, retailers and consumers. “They’ll make sure there’s no debris or growing media visible on or around that mushroom, whether they use a brush, a little blower, a towel or a cloth.”
“The best tool is a toothbrush,” Lee says. “Because they’ve got all those bristles that can get into the nooks and crannies.” Nozedar, for her part, is not too bothered by a bit of mud. “Just cut off any manky bits,” she says. “Hopefully, there won’t be too many.”
When it comes to cooking an unfamiliar variety of mushroom, Bebbington’s advice is to start by doing what you would normally do. “People tend to know what they’re getting with the white mushroom,” he says, “and this apprehension about what to do with the exotics, I’d say, initially, just do the same.” Try them in omelettes, soups or pies, and see what they bring to the party.
Exotic mushrooms sold in mixed packs can be cooked together. “Usually, I will cook at least five varieties in the same pan,” Bebbington says. “You’ll find the right note to hit, the harmony between what is slightly overcooked and what is slightly undercooked,” he says. For his regular supermarket cooking demonstrations, Bebbington hands out bruschetta topped with mushrooms cooked with ginger, shallots and cream.
The general advice is to keep it simple – most mushrooms will benefit from being sautéed gently until tender. “The flavours are all different,” said Nozedar, “but largely, if you’re trying them for the first time, I would say, [use] decent olive oil and garlic, and just fry them up until they smell amazing.”
One other rule: don’t crowd the pan. “Mushrooms release this astonishing amount of water, which can create a gloop in which these darlings boil rather than fry,” Lee says. “That’s when you get that strange rubbery texture.”
Flavours that suit one mushroom tend to suit most others, so don’t overthink it. “Just that affinity with garlic, parsley, butter and shallots – it really is a wonderful thing and applicable to all mushrooms,” says Lee.
Know your mushrooms
Shiitake
The name comes from the shii tree, on whose decaying logs the mushrooms were often found, but shiitake have been cultivated in Japan since at least the 13th century.
Those you find in shops may well come from, among other places, Southport, where Smithy Mushrooms produces them throughout the year. Its shiitake are grown on a sterile, human-made substrate – logs formed of compressed sawdust – which has been inoculated with spores. In the past, these raw materials were imported, but Smithy is expanding to produce substrates inhouse. “Because the demand has grown, and then you take out the shipping side of it, the carbon footprint side of it, it’s now become logically the right thing to do,” says Bebbington.
Shiitake are among the more durable mushrooms available, and will keep a good while in the fridge. Before you cook them, you should remove the stems, which although edible are unpleasantly tough. You can conserve them to make stock.
Oyster
Smithy Mushrooms grows three kinds of oysters. “We do yellow oysters, pink oysters and brown oysters,” says Bebbington. “The base raw material for those oyster mushrooms is wheat straw.” Although the wheat straw is metabolised as the mushroom feeds on the organic matter, oysters are, like all mushrooms, gluten free.
While they can all be cooked the same way, the three varieties are subtly different. “The yellow mushrooms are very brittle,” says Bebbington. “They’re very crispy, crunchy and aromatic.” This makes them perfect for stir-fries and salads, where the colour makes an impact. “Brown mushrooms are velvety and creamy,” he says. “Whereas a pink oyster mushroom is bitter to taste and chewy, excellent for things such as soups and stews.”
King oyster
King oysters are also sold under the name eryngii. Larger and denser than other oysters, the eryngii is having a moment. Bebbington says: “We’ve seen a huge growth in that market, particularly in the past few years, because they are a fantastic meat substitute in that they’re such a dense, heavy mushroom, that doesn’t shrivel and shrink like a white mushroom.”
King oysters are big enough to be split lengthways and roasted, but Bebbington also suggests shredding them into strings with two forks before cooking them on a tray in the oven. “Low and slow, 15 minutes,” he says, “until they’re chewy but not crispy. Take them out, fold them in a bit of barbecue sauce, chuck them on a bun with a dressed salad, and you’ve got a vegan pulled-pork sandwich.”
Portobello
The field mushroom is a common variety native to Britain, and portobello is the name given to the really big ones of 10cm (4in) or more across. “Sometimes they grow to extraordinary, parasol scale,” says Lee. “Unbelievably meaty.”
They are not difficult to cook. “Peel the skins off the outside, chop them into slices,” says Nozedar. She suggests cooking them in “garlic, salt, olive oil, sun-dried tomatoes and a little bit of white wine. Reduce it down and that is the best meal you’ve ever had.”
Alternatively, you can cook a big one whole. “Put a knob of garlic and parsley butter in the middle of a portobello and bake it in the oven,” says Lee. “When they’re soft and yielding, let them rest for a bit and then carve it like beef into beautiful thick slices. That’s great fun, and it’s delicious.”
Morel
Morels can’t be cultivated, at least not commercially. They grow wild and are harvested by foragers, and priced accordingly. As a spring mushroom, they are also among the few that will be in season in the coming weeks (you can get them now, as long as you don’t mind paying £100 a kilo).
“They’re one of the great early spring harvests,” says Lee. “They generally coincide with the first broad beans, and a very delicious fricassee of guinea fowl or chicken with morels and broad beans is one of the great dishes – it’s absolutely scrumptious.” Whatever way you choose to use them, morels need to be thoroughly cooked because if consumed raw, they can cause stomach upset.
Girolle and chanterelle
You won’t see these two highly prized wild varieties until the end of summer. They are generally imported from Europe, although girolles do grow in Scotland. “They usually appear in late August, right the way through September and often into October as well,” says Lee. “They’re beautiful, golden, wonderful things.”
When it comes to cooking them, he recommends a bordelaise treatment: “Fry them lightly in olive oil – or goose fat, even; that’s quite good – and then add a knob of butter and a smattering of finely chopped shallots and very finely chopped garlic for a quick, last fry. Then add an almighty amount of chopped parsley and three tears of lemon juice.”
Enoki
These are those long, stringy white mushrooms with tiny caps that you find sold in bagged clusters in supermarkets. Enoki could be mistaken for beansprouts, and they are often featured in soups. “They’re a bit wormy and weird,” says Nozedar. “I don’t like the flavour of them, personally. But my partner absolutely loves them.”
Enoki are found wild in the UK, but the cultivated version is encouraged to grow long and thin through increased exposure to carbon dioxide. If you use them in salads, they should be blanched briefly.
Unfortunately, enoki mushrooms were America’s most recalled food of 2022. Imports from Korea, China and Taiwan were taken off the shelves 11 times last year, because of fears of listeria contamination, a problem said to be related to the high humidity needed for cultivation.
Chicken of the woods
This is a wild, yellow fungus found growing on the trunks of trees, so-called because it really does taste like chicken. “I don’t eat meat and I haven’t done for years,” says Nozedar. “And the first time I had chicken of the woods, it felt really wrong – so like the chicken that I had decided I was never going to eat ever again. Part of me felt guilty.”
Chicken of the woods is wild and out of season, and is largely included here to distinguish it from hen of the woods, which also goes by the name maitake.
Maitake
Hen of the woods and maitake are essentially the same. “The difference is one is cultivated and one is not,” says Bebbington. “Hen of the woods is the wild version.” The dense, frilly heads can be brushed with oil and barbecued, whole or halved.
Porcini
Also known as a cep, or a penny bun, porcini are the most prized of mushrooms, foraged across Europe – and here in the UK – by those who know where to look.
“It’s probably the rarest one,” says Lee. “And folks jealously guard their porcini hunting grounds. Whenever you ask someone, ‘Where did you get this?” they just laugh in your face.”
Even top restaurateurs such as Lee struggle to find supplies during the autumn season. “The pecking order is just absolutely hilarious, and the cost astronomic, so we don’t even consider them any more,” he says. “But now and again, there’s a phone call.”
At this time of year, you will only encounter dried porcini, and these can vary in quality and condition, says Lee, “from strange, dark and wizened-looking to elegant, light things”.
“The rule is: the darker they are, the less tender they are and almost certainly will require rinsing of any grit.” Like all dried mushrooms, the porcini will need to be reconstituted by steeping them in just-boiled water for 15 to 20 minutes. Gently squeeze out excess moisture and they are ready to go into risottos, soups and stews. “People get very excited about the resulting tea-stained liquid, that can often be quite bitter,” says Lee. If it’s a light, golden colour, it can be used judiciously, like stock, in a risotto. “If it’s very, very dark, I would say just dispatch it.”
