Here are some store bought mushrooms and a recipe for #mushroommonday
I am fortunate to have an Asian supermarket near me.
They have all sorts of strange mushrooms here.
They also have plenty of dried ones, mostly shiitakes and enokitake. These are easy to liven up by throwing them in a soup or just soaking them in water.
Here is a strange one I've never seen before with some kind of cracked looking cap.
I come here for the king oysters so I can make mushroom jerky.
They also have fresh wood ear mushrooms that I use for mushroom chips. To season the jerky and chips I create a spicy soup full of random spices from cajun mixes to garlic and hot peanut oil with an overlay of salt and pepper. Once the broth is made I let it simmer for a couple hours so all the spices mix into the wood ear and king oyster.
Here are the king oysters after simmering for a couple hours. I place them on the dehydrator drying rack and add another layer of salt and spices.
Here's how the king oysters look after dehydrating for around 8 hours. They have a perfect texture very similar to beef jerky.
The wood ear gets a different treatment. Once they are done simmering I blend them into a paste. A few of the peppers (the red cayenne bits) accidentally got blended into this mix as well... So this batch of chips will be very spicy lol.
The wood ear paste is spread out thinly on the drying sheet.
This is what it ended up looking like after around 10 hours drying. I'm still working out a way to dry them into specific shapes rather than just a big square lol. For now I just break these apart into random sized pieces for dipping in guacamole. These have a similar crispy texture as blue corn chips, fortunately the red peppers didn't make it too spicy.
On my trip to the Asian supermarket I found an interesting new product. These Shiitake chips are actually pretty amazing, somehow they figured out a way to freeze dry them so the whole mushroom is crunchy like a chip without any chewiness at all. There are many flavors as well, from wasabi to spicy to teryaki. I'll have to try some tests on shiitake for my next mushroom recipe.
That's all for now happy #mushroommonday :-)