Video:How to Cook With Fresh Mushrooms

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Transcript:How to Cook With Fresh Mushrooms

Hi! This is Jesse Rosado for About.com. Today we're going to be talking about how to cook with fresh mushrooms.

Learn the Different Kind of Mushrooms

Let's talk about different kinds of mushrooms. Here we have a New England button mushroom. This is a very common mushroom, available in stores everywhere. This kind of mushroom is very good in salads, sliced up, or as a pizza topping. This is a very good mushroom for that.

This here is a cremini mushroom, otherwise known as a baby portabella. One of the descriptors I've heard to describe this mushroom is meaty. That's exactly what it is, a very meaty mushroom, and it's very good cooked, and the larger mushroom can sometimes be served as the centerpiece of a dish.

This one here is an oyster mushroom. It's a wild mushroom, very rich mushroom flavor. A lot of mushroom medleys will contain this mushroom. This one here is an Asian variety, the shiitake mushroom, and is pretty readily available in most grocery stores. You can buy these dried, or you can buy them fresh, like I have here. It has a flat crown, and it has a pretty rough stem, so you always what to take off that stem there.

Always Buy Firm Mushrooms with Good Color

When shopping for button mushrooms, you want to look for a firm mushroom, firm to the touch, and doesn't have any discoloration. We've got one here that's got some bruising and some discoloration at the top, just to show you a contrast. These are the kind of mushrooms you want to avoid. These wild mushrooms I have here are a little different from the button mushrooms. This baby mushroom or baby portabella has no visible bruising, firm mushroom top, the stem is attached.

Clean Mushrooms With a Damp Towel

So when cleaning mushrooms, one thing to remember is that mushrooms are mostly water, so you don't want them to absorb too much water to affect their flavor. One way to clean them is by dipping a paper towel in some clean water, and just patting the mushroom, wiping it off, all the way around. And then you take a dry paper towel, and just dry them off.  So to store them, just put a piece of plastic wrap over the top of the container, and it goes into the top of the refrigerator just like that.

Slice Mushrooms and Saute Them in a Hot Skillet

Now that we've got our mushrooms cleaned and dried, now we're going to start to prep. If you have little bruises like this one here, just go here and take these slices off. This is a good way to do fresh sliced mushrooms, just like this - use a nice sharp knife. Now I'm going to chop up the rest of my mushrooms to get them ready for a nice sauteed mushroom mixture.

So the next thing we're going to do is start with a hot pan, we're going to put in a combination part oil, part butter, get that pan medium hot, throw in the mushrooms here and start to saute them. And from there, we're going to saute them until they get a lot of their juices cooked out, you'll see those juices start to reduce.

I'm going to use these later in a pasta dish, but you could also use these as a pizza topping, you could use these as a filling for a nice French omelette with wild mushrooms inside.And those are some ideas on cooking with fresh mushrooms. Thanks for watching! To learn more, please visit us on the web at About.com.