The porcini mushroom is rightfully considered royal. Its taste, aroma and health benefits are much higher than those of all other brothers. However, a successful trip for fresh boletus brings not only joy, but also considerable worries. Collected mushrooms need to be cleaned, washed, processed, and harvested. How to do this correctly for different types of preparations, how long freshly cut boletus mushrooms can be stored, what poisonous look-alikes there are - find out further.
Preparation
To make the task of initially cleaning porcini mushrooms easier, you need to soak them in water for a short time. To do this, carefully transfer the boletus mushrooms into an enamel pan. Fill completely with cold water, add a small amount of salt (this will get rid of insect larvae).
Place pressure on top so that the mushrooms do not float on the surface. After 10-20 minutes, the water must be drained, otherwise the boletus mushrooms will absorb moisture, and this will not have the best effect on their taste.
Important! The calorie content of porcini mushroom in its raw form is only 22 kcal per 100 g. But after drying, it soars to 286 units. So people who are prone to obesity need to choose other methods of preparing boletus mushrooms, for example, making fried, boiled or pickled mushrooms.
Forest mushroom soup with celery and fennel
Photo: Hands neo-bistro
Recipe by Vyacheslav Kazakov, chef of Hands neo-bistro
Bouillon:
- 10 g dried whites
- 1 liter of water
- 15 g sun-dried tomatoes
- 50 g fresh tomatoes
- Black pepper, allspice, bay leaf, salt
- 50 g butter
Fried mushrooms:
- 500 g of forest mushrooms (porcini, chanterelles, honey mushrooms)
- 120 ml mushroom broth
- 50 ml white wine
- 30 ml cognac
- 20 ml vegetable oil
- 20 g butter
- Thyme, salt, black pepper
- 1 tooth garlic
Article on the topic
Secretive killers.
How do poisonous mushrooms affect the body? Pickled vegetables :
- 100 g celery root
- 100 g fennel
- 30 ml olive oil
- 5 ml apple cider vinegar
- Salt
To submit:
- 30 g pickled vegetables
- 5 ml truffle oil
- 100 g ptitim paste
- 40 g sour cream
- 5 ml green oil
Step 1. For the broth, add water to all ingredients, bring to a boil and simmer over low heat for an hour. Add salt, add spices, strain the finished broth.
Step 2. Cut the mushrooms into large slices, fry in a mixture of vegetable and butter with thyme and garlic, pour in wine and cognac, evaporate.
Step 3. Add mushroom broth, add salt and simmer until tender.
Step 4. Bring the broth to a boil, add fried mushrooms and salt, and boil. At the end add 50 g of butter.
Step 5. To prepare pickled vegetables, cut the roots into small cubes, season with oil, vinegar and salt.
Step 6. Pour the soup into a plate, add boiled poultry, pickled vegetables and sprinkle with green oil. Serve sour cream separately.
How to clean porcini mushrooms at home
Boletus mushrooms are unique in their own way. They grow in any forest - deciduous, coniferous, mixed. These fruiting bodies are not picky about soils. Therefore, they can be found on sand and clayey lands, even in mosses among swamps. Whites love sun and moisture, if there is enough of both, they can appear in May and October.
Boletus mushrooms grow all over the globe with the exception of the poles. It’s not for nothing that white mushrooms are called royal mushrooms. They are very tasty and aromatic, do not lose their snow-white color when cut and shape during any type of culinary processing. Strong, beautiful, these mushrooms can grow to gigantic sizes.
After harvesting, it should be stored for no more than 3-4 hours, especially in hot weather. Can be kept in the refrigerator or cellar for 1-2 days, but only if absolutely necessary. To preserve the full taste and maximum benefits, mushrooms should be cleaned immediately after harvesting. Ideally, still in the forest. But it’s much more convenient to do this at home, so most mushroom pickers prefer to clean boletus mushrooms in their own kitchen.
What you need
To clean the fruiting bodies, you need to prepare three large, cleanly washed enamel basins. Fill one with warm water; the mushrooms and knife will be rinsed in it during processing. The second one will be needed for waste. And the third will contain purified whites.
The knife should be made of stainless steel, with a short blade and a comfortable, non-slippery handle. Vegetable is best. A small piece of clean, soft cloth or an old toothbrush will make cleaning the caps easier.
Reference! Fruit bodies intended for drying or freezing for long-term storage are not washed or soaked in water.
Step by Step Actions
Let's look at how to properly clean porcini mushrooms before cooking:
- After soaking, rinse under running water, paying special attention to the lower surface of the caps, which are most susceptible to contamination. This helps get rid of sand and debris in the spongy layer of the fruiting body.
- Leave in a colander or sieve for a few minutes to allow excess moisture to drain.
- Use a soft cloth to wipe the top of the caps from adhering leaves, pine needles or sand (after soaking, these contaminants can be removed without effort).
- Use a knife to renew the cut on the legs.
- If the skin on the caps comes off easily, you need to peel it off.
- For most processing, the stem must be removed.
- Properly inspect the boletus caps - they may have wormholes. If they are too badly damaged, throw them away; where they can be cut out, do it as carefully as possible.
- The legs are cleaned from top to bottom with a sharp knife. Particular attention should be paid to the thick part - this is where the greatest contamination is located (moss, pine needles, earth).
- The wormy legs are thrown away, the rest will be used.
- In a bowl of warm water, lightly rinse the peeled mushroom and place it, cap down, in a clean bowl. If the legs separate, they need to be placed in a separate container.
- Cut large caps into several pieces. Leave the small ones whole.
- Thick legs are cut crosswise into stumps 3-4 cm thick. Thin legs are cut lengthwise into 2 or 4 parts. Slicing is done immediately before freezing, pickling, drying or cooking.
Now the boletus mushrooms are prepared for later use in accordance with the recipe.
Important! The chitin shell of the proteins contained in porcini mushrooms is not processed by the child’s body.
After gathering in the forest
During the “quiet hunt”, you can immediately prepare boletus mushrooms as much as possible for subsequent processing. To do this, you need to assemble them correctly and trim off the excess on the spot. This way you won’t bring waste home and won’t infect healthy mushrooms with worms.
You need to collect boletus mushrooms by carefully twisting them out of the ground, unlike moss mushrooms, honey mushrooms or champignons, which need to be cut off with a sharp knife. In this way, the mycelium will be preserved and the fruiting body will not receive mechanical damage.
Before you put the white one in your cart, you need to inspect it carefully. Remove all rotten and wormy parts, clean the stem, especially at the root. Wipe the hat from the remnants of forest debris (leaves, pine needles, soil).
Place porcini mushrooms in a bucket or basket with their caps facing down. This way they retain their shape better, do not wrinkle or break during transportation. After cleaning the forest at home, all that remains is to wash and cook the boletus mushrooms.
Important! We must remember that mushrooms are excellent absorbents and absorb everything that is around them. Therefore, you cannot collect boletus mushrooms near populated areas, roads or industrial and agricultural enterprises.
Features of the view
Porcini mushroom is included in the first category in terms of taste, with valuable nutritional composition, noble white and dense pulp, which does not darken when cut and during heat treatment.
The cap is brown, in light and dark shades depending on age, velvety to the touch, 7-30 cm in diameter, and in a particularly favorable climate it can be found even up to half a meter. The shape at a young age is hemispherical, straightens over time.
The leg is up to 12 cm, in some giants – up to 25 cm. Thickness is 7-10 cm. The shape is cylindrical, sometimes similar to a barrel or a mace. The color can be white or brown, sometimes a fine mesh pattern is visible.
The mushroom is found on almost all continents; it loves humidity and warmth, so it can appear, depending on the weather, in May and autumn.
Grows in any forest: coniferous, deciduous and mixed. It is a symbiont and forms mycorrhiza with oak, pine, spruce, fir, birch, hornbeam, and aspen. It is not fussy about soils; it can grow on sand and among mosses and lichens. Therefore, on the collected whites you can find pine needles, fragments of dry leaves, sand, and moss, depending on the location of the find.
How to clean the cap of a porcini mushroom
If boletus mushrooms are collected in dry weather, there will be no particular difficulties during processing. If during rain or immediately after, then the cap may contain a lot of sand or earth in the lower part, where they fall in large quantities. Therefore, in the first case, it is enough to wipe the upper part of the mushroom with a soft cloth. In the second, rinse thoroughly under running water and brush with an old toothbrush. Sometimes you have to remove part of the cap due to rot or worm infestation.
An easily removable skin indicates that the mushroom has begun to deteriorate. Therefore, you need to be especially careful to prevent potentially dangerous parts from getting into your food.
Pickling
Most often, tubular types that do not contain bitterness are pickled. Small mushrooms are marinated separately, and large ones should be cut into pieces. The legs need to be separated from the caps, and they can be marinated either together or separately. Mushroom pickers advise selecting the caps and using the stems for preparing other dishes.
If the boletus is young, it is necessary to remove the lower film. It is more convenient to do this with the tip of a thin knife. The stem should be left a couple of centimeters from the cap.
Those mushrooms that will be pickled cannot be washed, as they will absorb water, which is extremely undesirable. It is better to wipe them with a damp cloth.
Do I need to peel the stem of porcini mushrooms?
Necessarily. There are no mushrooms with a completely clean stem. It is located partially underground or in the forest floor, so it is always dirty. It can be leaves, pine needles, moss, earth. In addition, the worms penetrate the mushroom through the stem. Most waste occurs when processing this part of boletus mushrooms.
Immediately after collecting in the forest, you need to clean the mushroom stem from visible dirt and check for the presence of wormholes. If found, cut it out and throw it away. At home, the entire leg is completely cleaned and thoroughly washed under running water to remove sand, soil, and remnants of forest debris.
Possible problems and ways to solve them
When collecting fruiting bodies, even experienced mushroom pickers can get carried away and not notice how their poisonous counterparts got into the basket with noble whites.
The most common boletus twin is gall. This mushroom is very similar in appearance to the white one. You can distinguish it by its cut. Boletus never changes its color. Even after cooking and marinating.
But the gall fungus will immediately darken at the cut site. If during cleaning you see such an effect, you need to immediately throw away the poisonous double and wash your hands thoroughly with soap.
Bile mushroom
Another problem is mushrooms that are too old. As a rule, they are simply stuffed with worms and insect larvae. This means they contain a huge amount of decomposition products. If you come across a heavily infected mushroom, it is better to throw it away without regret. The harm caused by such a specimen is difficult to predict - from indigestion to severe allergic reactions.
With age, decomposed proteins accumulate in old mushrooms and their unique taste qualities are lost. Therefore, it is better not to be greedy and not to take too old copies at all.
Reference! Porcini mushroom not only has a wonderful taste, but also brings great benefits in the treatment of many diseases - atherosclerosis, tuberculosis, anemia. It boosts immunity and improves the functioning of the gastrointestinal tract.
Fry
Before frying, mushrooms need minimal processing: they need to be scraped with a small sharp knife, if they are heavily soiled, and then wiped with a napkin, as Andrey Kolodyazhny recommends. Vyacheslav Kazakov agrees with his colleague: “If you want to fry crispy fresh mushrooms, then do not wash them, but clean them well. And don’t use a lot of oil when frying, otherwise it will be absorbed just like water.”
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