by J. Michael Wheeler
About a million years ago I worked for the restaurant-chain TGI Fridays and I was always amazed at how well they used the same ingredients in many dishes. It seemed, as I remember, that they used mushrooms in just about everything. The thing that I don’t remember is an army of prep cooks with cute little mushroom-shaped brushes delicately cleaning the dirt off of those thousands of mushrooms. They washed them. And so should you.
Harold McGee (On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen), the dean of kitchen science, tells us that
Cookbooks often advise against washing mushrooms sot as not to make them soggy or dilute their flavor. However, they’re already mostly water, and lose little if any flavor from a brief rinse.
Gourmet Magazine (July 2008) concurs:
[mushrooms] are about 90 percent water to begin with…As a test we soaked white and cremini mushrooms in water for five minutes; each one absorbed about one sixteenth of a teaspoon of water…So wash them as you would any other vegetable.
Washed mushrooms will get a bit slick; so if you’re going to eat them raw, let them dry on paper towels for about 15 minutes. And use them right away, as washing can damage the surface cells and cause them to discolor quickly.
