The wet method of cooking mushrooms
let's talk about the internet's favorite way of cooking mushrooms not in oil or butter or any other kind of fat at least not at first the internet's favorite way is to cook mushrooms in a little bit of water as though it were oil then if you want you can put in a little oil at the very end to Brown them off every time I cook mushrooms on the internet I get lots of people asking me hey don't you know about the water trick apart from its culinary virtues which I do not deny the water trick also has all of the ingredients of a 21st century viral recipe hack I mean admit it a lot of us get really excited by anything that seems to contradict classical culinary dogma and by classical of course I mean French everybody gets things wrong sometimes but the French culinary establishment is often both wrong and snooty about it which is a punchable combination French Dogma states that getting mushrooms wet is the worst thing you can do to them you'll water log them and dilute their flavor that's why the class classical way of cleaning mushrooms is to just brush off the dirt no washing and that's probably mostly silly because mushrooms squeeze the water back out again when they cook sauteing mushrooms in water feels like a very satisfying repudiation of something that's Highly Questionable from our past and it's a good method that I will demonstrate to you now I will also tell you why I usually don't do it I usually cook mushrooms the conventional way anyway a mushroom is kind of like a piece of bread in that it is comprised of a fibrous structural Network enclosing some water but mostly air that foamy structure is just harder to see in a mushroom because it's a much finer structure even with this microscope you can just barely see some of the tiny little air pockets inside this seemingly solid Mass if we look over here with the gills in the background you can see these tiny little hairs that's the Leading Edge of the hyphae basically the entire mushroom is made out of those little threads densely interwoven into what looks like a solid but there's actually tons and tons of empty space between the threads the threads comprising bread are just made out of gluten proteins not strings of fungal cells unless your bread is super moldy but is a similar structure it's just bigger say I wanted to Brown this in a pan like a mushroom I'd heat a generous film of oil drop the bread in let the crust solidify to the point where it won't tear when I try to release it from the pan same thing you do with meat then I'll move it around a little and when side one is done I will flip it but look there's no oil left in there to Brown the other side all the oil has diffused into the vacant cavities inside the bread I have to add more oil to Brown the other side and at this point our giant Crouton is almost soaked through with oil it tastes better than I'd like to admit but it's not something you'd want to eat every day this is what happens when you try to brown mushrooms in oil you dump them in the first couple minutes of cooking go really well we're going getting some nice brown color and flavor that I can smell but all of a sudden the oil is just gone the pan feels dry and I'm tempted to add even more oil I have a whole video in the description about why we cook food and oil to begin with but the basic thing is that it serves as a thermal interface it fills the gaps between the surface of the pan and the food and it transmits heat up into the food if you try to cook a mushroom in a totally dry pan it sticks really bad ouch and it smells and tastes bad because the tiny bits that are in direct contact with the pan are burning while the rest of the surface is just steaming we need oil to distribute the heat more evenly anyway the spongy structure of the mushroom absorbs the oil and that's not the only bad thing that happens after a couple of minutes the hyphae network starts to break down and collapse as cells are ruptured and the water inside the mushroom spills out at this point the pan starts spitting like crazy and making a mess water hits the hot oil and explodes the steam if you're only cooking a few mushrooms at a time this is merely an inconvenience but nobody Cooks this few mushrooms at a time because mushrooms shrink a ton when you cook them so you need to start with a big pile of mushrooms in your pan and that works fine until they start to release their water at which point the pan is flooded with water and the temperature plummets just like when you crowd a pan with meat you cannot Brown anything in water you have to wait until you've evaporated it all out if you want to try to get some more color on these which you can do I do sometimes and the result of such conventional mushroom cookery is undeniably delicious though maybe not the best thing for me to eat with all of the oil that is in and on the mushrooms maybe instead I'll have a bowl of cereal from Magic spoon sponsor of this video hey the birthday cake flavor is now a 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box of this with a box of this whatever cereal you want what else I got in here oh fruity that's my favorite one but the birthday cake is pretty close thank you magic spoon anyway cooking mushrooms with water there's lots of different ways to do this but what I'm demonstrating is literally using water in the place of oil a thin film of water in a hot pan mushrooms in and the water is also a very effective thermal interface these don't stick to the pan and they start to cook down very fast because the water is spreading all that heat all around the mushroom only problem is there is less heat because under normal atmospheric conditions water can only get to 100 degrees Centigrade before it evaporates and that's just not hot enough to Brown These what we do instead is just cook these until that spongy hyphae structure has collapsed and the mushrooms have pushed out most of their own water and we wait for everything to evaporate this is where things usually go wrong for me because ideally I don't want to cook the mushrooms so thoroughly I like to cook them until they've shrunk by about half these have shrunk by more than that but I have to keep cooking them to evaporate all of that water so that I can eventually Brown These there is zero color on these mushrooms because they have not yet seen any hot oil oil you got to cook almost all the water out and then you can put in a little oil Brown the surface and those are very very nice this is a good way of cooking mushrooms and less messy because you don't get that spitting stage my only criticism is I think the texture tends to be a little leathery because I think this method usually overcooks the mushrooms a little people will tell you that you can't overcook mushrooms it's impossible I mean plants you can definitely overcook because their cell walls are reinforced chiefly with pectin and pectin just breaks down during cooking the cell walls of funguses like mushrooms those are reinforced with this stuff called chitin which is a polymer it's kind of like a carb but also kind of like a protein and what matters is that it's much more stable at high temperatures it doesn't break down as much and so yeah you don't really ever cook mushrooms down into mush I mean you'd have to really try to do that but you can fully collapse that High face structure and the result is a little unpleasantly dense to my taste when I cook mushrooms conventionally and in oil I try to start really hot and fast to get some color on them before the water comes out and then I just cook them as long as I want I usually don't bother trying to evaporate all the water for a second Browning phase I just cook them until they've shrunk by about half and at that point it feels to me like the structure has not fully collapsed there's still some cavities in the core of that mushroom and the texture is more pleasant to me now Look I am not sure of the explanation that I just gave I have not scientifically proven that that's the mechanism responsible for the textural difference that I'm experiencing but here's some evidence a raw mushroom slice will float in water because it's filled with all of those tiny Airy cavities here's my conventionally sauteed mushroom slice and it doesn't float but it also doesn't plummet right to the bottom either it takes its time getting down there because there's still some air inside that structure here's the mushroom slice we cooked in water before Browning it in oil and it sinks Like a Stone because we had to cook it until its internal cavities had fully collapsed or at least that is my hypothesis about what's going on here I mean an alternative explanation would be that the conventionally sauteed mushroom just absorbed more oil and oil floats too right people say that that's the problem with conventionally sauteed mushrooms that they just absorb way too much oil when they're too greasy and maybe you don't like that for health reasons maybe you don't like that for just sort of textural or experiential reasons or whatever but I'm not totally sure that I'm convinced that that's what happens here that the mushroom that's sauteed in oil absorbs way more oil than any other mushroom because you can plainly see that even though the mushrooms absorb a ton of oil they squeeze some of it back out again as they cook and Shrink resist the temptation to add more oil and eventually you will find the pan feeling greasy again because some of the oil pushes back out I have no idea how much and I'm sure it depends on how you cut the mushrooms Etc cook your mushrooms either way but both methods work and the results are very very similar but the next time somebody gets in touch and asks why I don't usually use the water trick now I have a video that I can just send in response
