Tuesday 28 August 2012

Getting the most from your mushrooms

I promise, a real recipe will come soon. I was writing one up this morning and I thought this deserved a post of its own. My husband once asked why I cooked my mushrooms in butter, and just used a spray of olive oil for most other veggies. While butter undoubtedly gives them a better flavour, it's not that simple. Mushrooms contain high levels of vitamin D, something many of us are in short supply of, white mushrooms have the least, darker and wild varieties contain more. However all this is useless if you dry fry your mushrooms, as vitamin D is fat soluable, meaning it needs fat for your body to absorb it. Butter is better than oil in this case as it contains vitamin A, which assists the absorption of vitamin D. You can even up the vitamin D content of your mushrooms by leaving them in direct sunlight for a few hours (use straight away or they might get a bit shrivelled). I took the picture above in France last summer at a market, all the mushrooms sold there were wild and packed with flavour, to try to replicate this on the cheap try throwing a handful of dried mushrooms in hot water half an hour before you need them to plump up. Dried mushrooms are pretty expensive (usually working out at over £60 a kilo/£2 for a 25g portion). If you can afford to order in bulk do it - I buy these ones at Amazon of all places, £10 for a 500g jar and you can throw them into all kinds of things at a more affordable 50p per portion.

3 comments:

  1. Aha! Well that's interesting! My Mam and Dad have always fried them in butter and I just followed suit, because they taste delicious. We always sigh and say how all tasty food is bad for you so it's nice to know these are actually better than they could have been! Mushies are my absolute fave!

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