How to dry mushrooms in the home
Another mushroom trip of your family to the nearestor the remote forest was unusually successful. Mushrooms fall out not only from the baskets, but even from the trunk of the car and sleeves of jackets. Congratulations and sincerely sympathize.
TNow you have to solve the well-known to everyonemushroom pickers the question: "And what to do with this unexpectedly fallen on your head wealth?". Passing to the impossibility of a dull procedure for bulkheads and cleaning mushrooms, let's try to assess this situation from a domestic point of view.
At the first stage it would be good to determine the main thing: is your family ready to absorb this crop fresh and do you need these forest trophies in the form of blanks for the winter? If the answer to the second part of the question is positive, immediately get down to business. Part of the beautiful and young "noble" mushrooms you will pickle, part of the spill collection, from which the envious eyes could not turn their back and the handles raking, for sure, salinity, and the rest ...
The rest we propose to dry. The novelty of this method of preparing food for future use can not boast, yet twenty thousand years of age is solid, but the reliability does not give way to any modern technology for canning mushrooms.
Which mushrooms are dried
For aesthetes - it's hats boletocks with a diameter notmore than 5 cm, for all others - all kinds of tubular mushrooms and some varieties of lamellar fungi. For people far from mycology, we will explain that white, boletus, birch bark, mosses and butter mushrooms (this is the main mass of mushrooms you collect) are ideal for drying, even when you are old.
Of course, the pulp of a young boletus does not compare withcrushed fibers of the leg and the fungal structure of the cap of the old white fungus, however, as life shows, in winter all the mushrooms fall into their lines. Therefore, we advise you to take care of the forest yield harvested by sweat and blood, and not to refuse the drying procedure to mushrooms that are plain, old, with a lower level of creativity. Perhaps, in winter everything will fit. With caution should be approached to dry plate-like fungi: sprat, russula, chanterelles, etc.
With external dry mouth, these individuals are filled withwater even more than their soft counterparts. At the same time, agaric mushrooms collected during the rainy season are distributed according to the drying time in a ratio of two to one. Let's say you have already decided on the assortment of mushrooms for winter soup or delicious potato cutlets with mushroom sauce. Where are we going to dry them?
Methods of drying mushrooms
1. Modern: how to dry mushrooms in an electric dryeralready familiar to many housewives electric driers for vegetables, fruits and other gifts of nature. The preparation of the "source material" here differs little from other methods. Mushrooms (hats and legs) are cut into pieces, the size of which does not exceed the borders of the match box, stacked on pallets and left for 4-5 hours at maximum mode. Perhaps in systems of electric dryers with vertical convection, a pallet exchange and intermediate bottom cleaning will be required, but everything depends on the appliances you have chosen.
2. Stove: how to dry mushrooms in a stovemushroom preparation, however, we are talking about Russian ovens with a large hotplate. In this case, harvested mushroom cutting is either threaded on a tight thread and is hung near the stove, or with an irregular firebox is exposed using wire "skewers" on brick supports. Stoke the stove and keep an eye on the uniformity of drying will have until the whole batch of mushrooms has dried. And what to do, such is the romance.
3. Oven: how to dry mushrooms in the ovenbetween the convector and the stove. It is inevitably used in country houses, in cottages, and sometimes in urban conditions. It should be said that of all the processes of drying mushrooms this is the most complex and unpredictable. Without a certain experience and developed family technology of heat treatment, precious mushroom billets can be irretrievably lost.
4. Children's, lazy: how to dry mushrooms in the sun Enoughremember where you dry your underwear, and your husband is frying fish to understand that the sun and a fresh breeze will make the preparation of dried mushrooms a pleasant and easy procedure. Alas, this option is good only for the summer of warm and not very rainy. Cut mushrooms should be smaller than in previous cases, in our view - in half a matchbox. You can string on a strong string, fishing line, thin wire. If it's too lazy, you can just throw it under a canopy on some tray.
Let the skeptics forgive me, but my many years of personal experience tells me that mushrooms dried in nature will always be the most delicious.
Author: Katerina Sergeenko
