A recalled foraging cookbook advised people to eat raw wild mushrooms startribune.com/minnesota-inst… ...which is the perfect excuse for me to dust off my favorite soapbox! Ahem.
🔥ALWAYS COOK THE H*CK OUT OF MUSHROOMS.🔥
🔥ALWAYS COOK THE H*CK OUT OF MUSHROOMS.🔥
Raw or undercooked mushrooms - edible species - can make you violently, disgustingly ill. This cookbook advises eating raw morels in particular, which is a good way to end up spending 12 hours in a cold sweat doing unspeakable things to the toilet.
(I can personally confirm this because I made the mistake of ordering morels at a restaurant once.)
Cooks tend to treat mushrooms like vegetables, but there are big differences between fungi and plants that have consequences in the kitchen (and sometimes the bathroom.) Mushrooms are not vegetables, and they should not be cooked like vegetables.
Plant cell walls are made of cellulose, which is tough & difficult to digest. Cooking vegetables until they're soft makes them easier to digest by breaking down the cellulose & making the nutrients inside the cells available for absorption.
Cooking mushrooms just until they’re soft isn’t sufficient, because their cell walls are made of chitin - the same material used in insect exoskeletons. Chitin is so indigestible that raw mushrooms can pass through the digestive tract intact!
Chitin itself is a GI irritant, but mushrooms like morels and chicken of the woods also produce toxins that can result in painful, prolonged, despair-inducing bowel distress. Thorough cooking breaks these toxins down into harmless compounds, but they must be THOROUGHLY COOKED.
Morels & chicken of the woods are so toxic, some people can't eat them even if they're well-done. Oyster mushroom species (Pleurotus) produce toxins that destroy blood cells - hemolysin & ostreolysin - and must be THOROUGHLY COOKED to be safely eaten.
Just because the toxin in the raw or undercooked mushroom won’t kill you doesn’t make it safe to consume. Many of these compounds can accumulate in human tissue over time (repeated consumption increases risk of toxicity.)
Besides the safety aspect, undercooking mushrooms makes all the delicious molecules inside the cells unavailable to you, locked away behind an impenetrable wall of chitin. Literally flushed down the drain! Such waste!
My recipe:
Cook your mushrooms long and tenderly in good olive oil on the low side of medium heat, juuust about until you’re like, wait, is that too much?
Lightly season with your fanciest salt.
Eat right out of the skillet, standing next to the stove/campfire, using chopsticks.
Cook your mushrooms long and tenderly in good olive oil on the low side of medium heat, juuust about until you’re like, wait, is that too much?
Lightly season with your fanciest salt.
Eat right out of the skillet, standing next to the stove/campfire, using chopsticks.
Also, the cookbook recipe had you drenching the raw morels in good chocolate, which is a mortal sin in any religion worth following.
