Friday Fungus: don't just eat your mushrooms raw - marinade them!

My natural instinct when told that something is bad for me (usually by some self-appointed nutritionist or a jumped up, ill-informed health fascist) is to tell them to bathe their heads in guano until they’re thought of a better livelihood. However, you trust me don’t you? I’m going to give you some advice on eating mushrooms raw.

“The mycochitin composition of mushroom cell walls, as opposed to cellulose walls of plant cells, is difficult for humans to digest. Our stomachs resent indigestible items, and often forcibly reject them without further ado. The cooking process helps break down fungal cell walls, rendering mushroom flesh not only more readily digestible, but also releasing significant nutritional value contained within the cells.”

As is the case with most raw vegetables, mushrooms contain substances that “may be carcinogenic” (and if you’re really worried about this don’t eat that raw celery and keep those radishes out of your salad). The article from which the quote above – and the carcinogen warning – comes is pretty unequivocal: don’t eat mushrooms raw.

For my part, I don’t wholly agree. I certainly wouldn’t recommend building your diet around raw mushrooms and would advise against eating field collected wild mushrooms raw (although the Italians routinely do this and seem to live long, happy and healthy lives in the main). But the domesticated shop mushrooms are fine for most folk – just make sure they’re clean and don’t feed them to people with over-sensitive tummies.

My suggestion, if you want to enhance your salads with mushrooms, is to marinade them. Do this just as you would pieces of chicken, meat or vegetables – make the marinade (whatever you fancy but wine vinegar, good olive oil and herbs is a good starter or you might try lemon juice and rapeseed oil), chop up some sweet pepper, and mix the whole lot together and leave to stand for a few hours in the fridge.

Great in a salad with the juice as a dressing or just use as a condiment with cheese or cold meat. And don’t forget a big glass of Chianti!

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Friday Fungus: Snow Mushrooms

Seemed appropriate given the current weather to talk about enoki - Japanese Snow Mushrooms (Flammulina velutipes). If you've an interest in Chinese or Japanese cookery you will have encountered these delicate mushrooms but I bet you didn't know they grow wild in the UK where we call them velvet shank. In the wild they do not look like the picture above but are yellowish brown and rather larger - the cultivated version is produced in huge quantities in the far east (over 100,000 tonnes annually).

The snow or winter mushroom description comes about because these fungi fruit very late and can survive a temperatures close to freezing. Golden Gourmet Mushrooms * describe them as follows:

"...enoki are found in the mountains often right at the snow-line growing in clusters on deciduous logs. Under outdoor conditions, wild specimens of this mushroom are short-stemmed with caps as wide as the stems are long. The lower portions of the stem have a darkened, velvety fuzz, hence the common name "The Velvet Stem" or "The Velvet Foot". Under artificial cultivation conditions first developed by Japanese growers, cultivated varieties of this mushrooms look entirely different. Manipulation of light, carbon dioxide and temperature conditions creates a beautiful bouquet of delicate, white, long-stemmed (4-5 inches), small-capped (1/3-1/2 inch) mushrooms."

*There's a recipe for smoked oysters, fried spinach and enoki on the Golden Gourmet web-site that looks good although I haven't tried it so can't vouch for it!

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