How do you get people to wash their vegetables when you're at their house and you don't wanna seem rude?
So awkward, but come on it says right there on the package to wash those mushrooms or whatever it is… You’re not their mom but you don’t wanna eat feces or whatever ended up on the produce. A quick rinse is never going to be perfect but it’s better than nothing.
In the absence of legitimate suggestions, commiseration is welcome too 😉
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Running mushrooms under water makes them soggy, that's just reality. You can get them just as clean wiping them with a slightly damp paper towel or cloth without that happening.
From Serious Eats:
"Soggy" is an exaggeration.
It's not about the absorption. They get soggy/slimy if you don't immediately cook them
I think you're about to cook them.
Been washing all kinds of mushrooms for years and I‘ve had the opposite experience. They’re only soggy if they’ve been cooking in oil, soaked it up, then dumped all their water. They don’t get brown as they soak up the oil, and then they dump it all out with the water, meaning you’re just steaming them until you evaporate off all the water.
Best is to wash the mushrooms, slice, cook in a little bit of water until they dump out their water, cook until the water has evaporated, then add oil and brown (or even crisp if you desire).
Perfect mushrooms every time (I’ve dated a lot of vegans so I’ve eaten mushrooms every few days for over a decade).
This assumes you're going to fry them. If you want raw mushrooms in a salad, it's going to be a lot more noticeable.
Wash them whole and dry them right after. Contrary to popular belief, they don’t soak up water like sponges with a quick wash. You can easily prove this by just weighing them before and after washing/drying. The weight change is minuscule.
Total water absorption doesn't matter that much because the significant thing is surface texture. If you're going to dry them anyway you might as well instead wash them without directly pouring water on them.
A friend of mine solves this by meticulously peeling the caps and discarding the stems. It seems like a lot of work to me. I use a mushroom brush to get the dirt and substrate/manure off and call it good.
It doesn't matter if they actually absorb water or not. Just try the mushrooms side by side, washed and unwashed. Decide based on what you prefer.
Raw mushrooms are borderline wasteful to eat. We can't digest the chitin and cell walls so most of the nutritional value passes straight through.
Just a note that raw mushrooms make people sick all the time and are a very common cause of food poisoning - especially wild mushrooms. You can get away with it with super common crimini mushrooms but some people are allergic even to that.
I've never had a problem with this, raw or cooked. The insides of my washed mushrooms are always dry.