How to Clean, Store & Preserve Your Mushroom Wild Harvest

You’ve just hit the mushroom mother-load. After weeks, months, or perhaps years of looking, you have finally done it! You take as many pictures as you can, stuff your basket full and get home while still on an adrenaline high. Suddenly an intimidating thought slowly creeps into your mind – how do I preserve my harvest?

Worry no more! After years of trial and error, research, testing and constant experimentation, I’ve come up with some tips and tricks to help you fully enjoy your foraged fungi.

How to Clean Your Fungi

After a long day of mushroom hunting, your favorite recliner looks like the perfect spot to kick up your feet and rest. But, it is important that you clean your fungi PRIOR to storing them in the fridge. Unlike store-bought mushrooms, wild fungi will have a much higher tendency to carry bugs and other creepy crawlers. We don’t want them pillaging our next meal, so be sure to inspect (pun intended!) your harvest once you are home. For this reason, I typically clean my wild mushroom harvests outside in my back yard.

Pro Tip: Always carry a pocketknife with you while harvesting fungi. Cut the tip or stem of the mushroom off while in the field, then put it into your bag. It will make the cleaning process much easier and may also help to promote future fungi growth.

Trim First

No matter what kind of wild mushroom you have, it is always important to trim them first to remove excess debris and dirt. I find that a paring knife works best. Cut off any dirty or damaged/bug eaten areas.

Brush Second

For store-bought mushrooms, the best way to clean your standard cultivated cremini or portabella is with a dampened paper towel. While that does work for a few wild mushrooms, the best way to clean your harvest is with a brush. No, you don’t have to get super fancy with extra tools or gear (although I am happy to recommend the brush I like to use the most, available for purchase on Amazon!).

One of the best ways to clean your wild fungi harvest is with a soft headed toothbrush. Many foraged mushrooms have layered fronds, tight gills and wide crevices perfect for hiding grains of dirt, sand or even the occasional acorn. Gently brush the caps to remove these excess bits.

Never Wash Your Mushrooms*

Whether store-bought or foraged, you should NEVER wash your mushrooms. Mushrooms are made up of 90% water and adding more water will muddy the flavor and ruin the texture.

There are, of course, a few exceptions to this rule. From my experience, I would say that there are 4 wild mushrooms which NEED to be washed to be best enjoyed.

The trick is to wash them as briefly as possible, by either dunking quickly in cold water, or scrubbing gently while under slow-running water.

*The 4 wild mushrooms that need washing are – Cauliflower, Lobster Mushroom, Black Trumpet (only if excessively sandy) and Morels.

Store Properly

Once your mushrooms have been trimmed and brushed, they are best stored in a brown paper bag with a slightly dampened paper towel placed at the bottom in your fridge. NEVER put mushrooms in plastic. Plastic will promote fast decay.

Depending on the kind of mushroom you have harvested and at what stage you picked it, wild fungi should last 5-7 days if properly stored. You can tell if a mushroom has started to decay if it is ‘sporing out.’ At the end of it’s lifecycle, mushrooms will send out spores to reproduce. These spores will make the brown bag look like it has been dusted with powdered sugar.

While the spores are great for growing mushrooms, its not great for consumption. In fact, most mushroom distress happens when people consume specimens that are far past their prime.

Preservation Tips

Whether simply sauteed, jerkied, in soups, stocks, pickled, powdered or cooked then frozen in duxelles – there are so many wonderful and delicious ways to preserve your haul. Here are some of my favorites to help you get started.

Dehydration

• Maitake/Hen of the Woods
• Black Staining Polypore
• Hericium
• Porcini
• Turkey Tails
• Lobster Mushrooms
• Beefsteak Polypore
• Boletes (painted, bi-colored, etc)
• Turkey tails
• Chaga
• Reishi

Sautee

• Morels
• Berkeley’s Polypore
• Chicken of the Woods
• Black Trumpets
• Chanterelles
• Hedgehogs
• Porcini
• Shrimp of the Woods (Aborted Entoloma)
• Beefsteak Polypore
• Boletes
• Hen of the Woods
• Hericium
• Lobster Mushroom
• Enoki

Jerky

• Black Staining Polypore
• Berkeley’s Polypore
• Hen of the Woods
• Oyster Mushrooms

Soups/Stock

• Reishi
• Morel
• Berkeley’s Polypore
• Black Staining Polypore
• Chicken of the Woods
• Black Trumpets
• Chanterelles – all
• Milky Caps – all
• Hen of the Woods
• Hericium
• Hedgehog
• Porcini
• Turkey Tail
• Oysters
• Green Cracking Russula
• Cauliflower
• Beefsteak
• Meadow Mushroom
• Boletes
• Leccinums
  

Duxelles

• Beefsteak
• Chanterelles
• Chicken of the Woods
• Oyster Mushrooms
• Hen of the Woods

Pickles

• Chicken of the Woods
• Hen of the Woods
• Oyster Mushrooms
• Porcini
• Some boletes/leccinum
• Chanterelles
• Dryads Saddle/Pheasant Back

Frozen

• Chicken of the Woods
• Oyster Mushrooms
• Hen of the Woods

Join me and sample a few of the preservation techniques above at my upcoming forage and tasting, or my next monthly wild food picnic:

September 13 at 10am in Lynn, MA: Foraging Walk & Tasting: Edible, Medicinal & Poisonous Fungi, Fruits, Plants and Herbs

September 27 at 10am in Waltham, MA: Foraging Walk & Monthly Wild Food Picnic