Roasted Garlic Soy Mushrooms
Should you wash mushrooms? + Best mushroom roasting practices + 2 Bonus brunch recipes
Two decades ago before we moved to Australia to call it home, Nick and I holidayed here for a month. We lived in a service apartment overlooking the Sydney Harbour and Opera House. On the weekends, we would explore local farmer’s markets and take the ferry to the beaches. It was peak winter and I would cook hearty, warming meals with gorgeous produce. Plump mushrooms fresh enough to snap in half with my fingers, the earthy aroma filling my nostrils. Eaten raw, straight from the paper bag … sweet and tender and plump. I would bring back amongst other things bunches of fresh thyme and sage tied up with twine and make mushroom soup, herby chicken potato and mushroom stew and roasted Portobello mushrooms topped with parmesan and herbs.
One weekend we took the train up to the Blue Mountains and booked ourselves a little stay at a heritage cottage B&B. On our first morning there, the nice African gentleman who was multitasking as the manager, cook and handyman cooked us a breakfast of scrambled eggs, grilled tomatoes and roasted mushrooms. The mushrooms were chopped fine and charred to a crisp, their acrid aroma overpowering everything else. So much so that I thought they were actually burnt bits of the toast that must’ve slipped off the plate.
With a heavy accent, our host informed us that the oven in the kitchen had a problem and that all the mushrooms he cooked that morning were burnt. He was so apologetic and lovely that we ended up pacifying him and told him, it was no trouble at all. (Of course, we ate everything else but the burnt mushrooms!). Over the years, this story became an amusing anecdote at dinner parties. And I still wonder to this day, why he had served the burnt mushrooms rather than just leave them out. Or what series of unfortunate events might have transpired for the mushrooms to burn. Because, it is so easy to sweat and stew mushrooms (Because they weep. Oh, they weep!), but really hard to burn them as they are practically 80% water!
I love mushrooms in all manners and forms. Roasting mushrooms in the oven is one of the simplest and most effective cooking techniques. Today, I am sharing my go-to recipe for glorious, sticky, golden-roasted mushrooms that are still plump and bursting with flavour. Plus dos and don’ts to ensure they stay dry and don’t weep in the oven.
This recipe may seem simple, but I am also sharing 2 delicious bonus brunch recipes that you can cook with these mushrooms for easy week lunches. We are having one of these recipes for breakfast and the other was packed in school/uni lunchboxes. Starting today, I also have downloadable and printable PDFs of recipes in the newsletters.
Should I wash mushrooms in water?
If I had a penny for every time I get asked this question. Most recently at the checkout of my local grocery store. As the lady scanned bag after bag of mushrooms I had bought, she confessed that she was paranoid about eating the dirt on the mushrooms