Meet Mushroom Meat
I dedicated the summer of 2010 to searching produce shelves and the culinary world for foods I could test in the jar top fermentor I created, the Perfect Pickler®. It was a wildly exciting time. I came to discover there is little you cannot pickle in a mild saltwater solution. The learning curve was not steep, and I came upon a few techniques to share.
What a Eureka! moment when I tried dried mushrooms. Right off I tried shiitakes, a food I came to love for its meaty taste and texture. In my cooking school I had also learned of the nutritional value of these mushrooms.
“Shiitake mushrooms are attributed with many medical properties.... They range from reducing cholesterol, lowering blood pressure, strengthening the immune system against diseases including viral ones, fighting tumors, and improving liver function. Many of the shiitake's health benefits come from the chemical compounds these mushrooms produce, these include lentinan, eritadenine, L-ergothioneine.... - http://www.driedshiitakemushrooms.com
In their dry form mushrooms have 80 percent of their weight removed. One pound of fresh shiitakes dehydrates to just 3 oz.. That concentrates their protein, nutrients, and flavor. When they are rehydrated their texture is transformed into a chew of filet.
As a chef and cooking instructor, I also look to energize the palate and satiation factor in vegetarian cooking. This is especially true for the raw foodies. What’s missing is a big meaty flavor punch; now found using this technique. Or if you just want to go light with a meatless meal—you might think you're cheating with pickled, dried mushrooms. The bigger picture: fermenting dried mushrooms will transform a vegetable based cuisine with the delightful taste of meatiness.
Ziti & Broccoli with Moroccan Shiitake Tagine
Great as a quick meal-maker ingredient
Other dried mushrooms also work. Their flavor is concentrated and the lactic acid bacteria in the ferment preserves them for months in the refrigerator.
I hadn’t seen any research on brine fermenting dried mushrooms and decided it would be my summer homework. I also did not want to harm the nutrient quality preparing these mushrooms, so I wondered if poaching them would affect their special phytonutrients. I contacted Casey Mullen at Fungi Perfecti, one of the foremost authorities on mushrooms, and found that rehydrating them in very hot water actually extracts more of these special nutrients. Then after fermenting they will become renatured with the live culture action and return them to a probiotic and enzyme rich food.
So I plunged in designing recipes, and to my surprise they not only pickle well, it was like finding the Rosetta Stone for vegan meatiness. You can create a bevy of recipes using a cook’s sense and regional spices and herbs. In a mad rush I created dishes from Mexico, Morocco, Argentina. I also fashioned them into mock clams, stews, sausage, and even Oysters Rockefeller! I dreamt of Korea and made BBQ Shiitake Bulgogi—a sweet and savory treat. It is a brand new brine fermenting world awaiting you, dear pickler.
Shiitake Klams on the Half Shell >
Locate dried shiitakes in Asian markets. Or you can source them on the internet. Since they are feather-light the shipping is not a concern. Look for smaller whole caps. There are also sliced varieties, but since shiitake stems are not useable (they never become tender), it is tedious to go over each slice and remove the stem portion. One source: http://www.driedshiitakemushrooms.com/ at $2.17 per ounce makes this a reasonable value.
To prepare an all-mushroom recipe for a one-quart size, use 3 cups of filter water and bring to the simmer. Meanwhile, soak 3 ounces of whole, dried shiitakes for a few minutes and then rinse them while in a colander. Add them to the simmering water and then take off the heat and cover for 30 minutes. Save the liquid as it will become the brine base. When cool enough, squeeze the mushrooms over the pot and then trim off the stem all the way up into each cap. Slice the caps into filets, or small dice (if you want to make sausage). Pour the reserved poaching liquid into a 2 cup measure. If short of 2 cups add filtered water, or even better, a little aged brine from previous batch of fermented vegetables to create 2 cups. You will then be adding the salt to this liquid when making up the brine for the recipe.
After the mushrooms are prepped, you can add onions, garlic, and spices from around the world to fashion your own recipe.
You can also prepare dried mushrooms as a flavor component to your current pickle recipes. I present you a lovely version below.
Mushroom Jerky
One more zinger! Dehydrate your finished mushrooms into delicious mushroom jerky—rich in culture and enzymes—and ready in an instant to rehydrate for on-the-go or instant meals. Great for hikers, campers, and boaters to flesh out a meal.
Oh, the places you will go! Wild mushrooms are picked, dehydrated, then rehydrated, fermented, and dehydrated again, but now with live-culture in your pantry or backpack!
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For the Mexican Chorizo recipe, and to be notified when the recipe set is available, send me an email > Mexican Chorizo
left:Mushroom Filets with Chimchurri
center: Mexican Chorizo Sausage
right: Shiitake Oysters
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Fermentor Farmacy (Raising Living Crops of Fun•ctional Foods)
Every so often an article comes along that resets a discussion and refocuses a solution; in this case, a VERY simple solution in creating probiotic cultures with dynamic benefits.
The following excerpt is revelatory in the power of probiotics and its effect on the immune system. This interview sheds light on how the immune system and digestive tract cooperate in providing daily monitoring of our health.
Furthermore, actual lab testing provides stunning results in creating probiotics when you ferment your own vegetables. The simple solution? Brine fermented vegetables offer 1,000 times more probiotic culture than store bought supplements. That’s great news for creating your own farmacy in the comfort of your home.
The following was excerpted from an interview Dr. Joseph Mercola, an osteopathic physician, board certified in family medicine, conducted with Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, a neurologist. The underlined passages are my highlights....
This Food Contains 100 Times More
Probiotics than a Supplement
“... about 85 percent of our immune system is located in the gut wall,” [says Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride.] “This fact has been established by basic physiology research in the 1930s and the 1940s. Your gut, your digestive wall, is the biggest and the most important immune organ in your body. There is a very tight conversation and a relationship going on between the gut flora that lives inside your digestive system, and your immune system...
Your gut flora—the state of the gut flora and the composition of microbes in your gut flora—has a profound effect on what forms of immune cells you will be producing on any given day, what they’re going to be doing, and how balanced your immune system is.” ....
The Importance of Fermented Foods
Did you know the number of bacteria in your body outnumber your cells by about 10 to 1? These bacteria in turn are comprised of both beneficial ones and harmful ones. The ideal balance is about 85 percent good bacteria and 15 percent bad. Maintaining this ideal ratio is what it’s all about when we’re talking about the importance of probiotics. It’s important to understand though that probiotics are not a new concept. The only thing that’s new is that you can take them in pill form. But historically, mankind has consumed large amounts of probiotics in the form of fermented and cultured foods, which were invented long before the advent of refrigeration and other forms of food preservation.
Fermented foods not only give you a wider variety of beneficial bacteria, they also give you far more of them, so it’s a much more cost effective alternative. Here’s a case in point: It’s unusual to find a probiotic supplement containing more than 10 billion colony-forming units.
But when my team actually tested fermented vegetables produced by probiotic starter cultures, they had 10 trillion colony-forming units of bacteria. Literally, one serving of vegetables was equal to an entire bottle of a high potency probiotic! So clearly, you’re far better off using fermented foods.
How the Fermentation Process Works
“.... If you look at the research in lactic acid, it is one of the most powerful antiseptics. It kills off lots and lots of bacteria.... So as the lactic acid starts producing, it will kill off all those putrefactive and pathogenic microbes and preserve the food. It’s a great preservative... A good batch of sauerkraut can keep for five to six years without spoiling or rotting, as long as it is covered by its own juice.”
This anaerobic process (fermentation) does more than just preserve the food, however. It also makes the nutrients inside the food more bioavailable. For example, according to Dr. McBride, the amount of bioavailable vitamin C in sauerkraut is 20 times higher than in the same helping of fresh cabbage!
“This is because in the fresh cabbage, vitamin C is bound in the cellulose structure and various other molecules, and our digestive system is just not able to cleave it off and absorb it. Lots of it goes undigested and come out right out of you. So despite the fact that cabbage may be very rich in vitamin C, a lot of it you will not be able to absorb. But if you fermented that cabbage and made sauerkraut, all the vitamin C becomes bioavailable,” she explains.”
So dear pickler, I leave you at your computer, sifting through this heady work.
Make haste! Make a shopping list and fetch your next recipe ingredients. We’ve got magnificent and artful work to do.
You can make inexpensive fun•ctional foods that greatly effect the quality of health at any time in your life. You have a fermentor farmacy at your hands.
Copyright 2012, Bill Hettig All rights reserved.