Oven Roasted Wild Mushrooms

All the rain this year has made for a bumper crop of wild mushrooms, and I’m pretty happy about it.  I have several books on wild mushrooms, and I’m not as good at identification as my father was, so I confine myself to what I’m positive about.  If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know I only collect one kind of mushroom – puffballs – nothing with gills.  Search puffball mushrooms on google to get images.  I haven’t found giant puffballs in this area, but I remember seeing them up north.  Because we don’t use synthetic fertilizers or chemicals, and use a mulching blade while mowing, it encourages their growth.  We have quite a few in the yard, and a lot in the field.  If you have an area that’s been plowed or tilled recently, it’s unlikely you’ll see mushrooms of any kind there.  And if you find one puffball, look around, because you’ll typically see more in the same area.  Using your fingers, you’ll have to gently coax them out of the ground, because they’re tender.

While I know you’re not supposed to rinse mushrooms, I do rinse these well, otherwise cleaning would be too tedious.  Then I drain them well and lay them out on kitchen towels to dry, before cutting the root end and slicing them.  I use my knife that will slice fresh tomatoes very thinly.  Make sure you slice each mushroom open, and it’s solid white on the inside.  If you see any differentiation on the inside, toss it.  When in doubt, throw it out.  When they reach the end of their lifecycle, they are greenish on the inside, when cut open – I toss those back in the field.

I’ve sautéed the first couple batches, but this last batch was too big, so I oven roasted them.  And Kathy had a good suggestion, since the crop is so enormous this year, to dehydrate some.  The picture below is of a quart ball jar, with two full pans of dehydrated mushrooms in it.  My dehydrator quit, so I lay the mushrooms in a single layer on large sheet pans, and leave them in a 170 degree oven for several hours.