Rainy, warm weather, interrupted by a few sunny days: This is the ideal mushroom weather, in which the fruiting bodies sprout from the ground - even more so if the spring was correspondingly wet. After a bountiful harvest, you then either have to invite friends and relatives to eat mushrooms - or preserve the fresh porcini mushrooms. There are different methods for this.
How do you preserve porcini mushrooms?
Porcini mushrooms can be preserved by freezing, drying, preserving or pickling. To freeze, freeze the mushrooms in pieces. To dry, dry the mushrooms in the oven at 50-70 °C. To preserve, cook in a broth with vinegar and pour into jars. To pickle, place the mushrooms in a marinade made from oil and herbs.
The best methods for preserving porcini mushrooms
Basically, forest mushrooms - which include porcini mushrooms - should be cleaned, processed and eaten on the same day. The fruit bodies, which are rich in protein and water, spoil within a very short time, but can be stored in the vegetable compartment of the refrigerator for a maximum of two to three days - of course cleaned and freed from any damaged areas. However, if you want to preserve the mushrooms for longer, the following methods are recommended.
Freezing
The easiest way is to freeze the raw, cleaned and cut into bite-sized pieces of porcini mushrooms in a freezer at around minus 18 °C. Blanching beforehand is not necessary. You can also freeze ready-made mushroom dishes, but you should cool them down with ice water immediately after cooking or frying and put them in the freezer immediately.
Drying
Dried porcini mushrooms are particularly aromatic and can be used for a variety of dishes, and mushroom powder - which is dried and then ground mushrooms - is wonderfully suitable as a versatile seasoning. Drying works best in a dehydrator or in the classic oven at around 50 to 70 °C.
Waking
For preserving, you need suitable preserving jars with a tightly sealable screw cap. Clean and cut a kilogram of porcini mushrooms and cook them in a stock for at least 15 minutes
- 600 ml water
- 200 ml wine vinegar
- some mustard, pepper and juniper seeds
- two to three bay leaves
- and two teaspoons of s alt
Then fill the mushrooms and stock (half each) into the cleaned and sterilized jars in boiling water, close them tightly and place them upside down on the lid for a few hours. The contents of the jar may only be eaten if the lid audibly cracks when opened!
Insert
Porcini mushrooms are also very suitable for pickling in a marinade made of vinegar and/or oil and herbs. For this purpose, however, you should first fry them in butter or a butter-olive oil mixture and a little s alt and cook them well. However, add the s alt only after frying.
Tip
Actually, the main season for porcini mushrooms is autumn: between September and November you can find numerous of these tasty edible mushrooms in suitable places and when the mushroom weather is right. However, you can start looking for the no less delicious summer porcini mushroom from May onwards.
