FRESH MUSHROOMS--wash or not to wash,

I would wash - most mushrooms seem to be grown in manure - so unless you want to eat poop, I would wash them.

I'm more likely to brush them than wash them.

Do you use water when you brush them? I'd consider that washing or maybe scrubbing. I usually wash them in water and then kind of rub the outer layer off. Kind a like scrubbing but with my hands.

Maybe I will use a brush next time - like I do with potatoes.

gads they are not. The mushroom COMPOST, may have had some bedding hay but this is all composted by high heat and bacterial breakdown. Compost (at lest the German process that most US mushroom businesses use today) reaches qbout 165 F thus pthogens are gone (except for extremophiles which biologically break down the vegetal materil intoa nutrient rich compost). Nobody grows shrooms in "poop"

Alton Brown did an experiment ith fresh mushrooms and concluded , from his results, that washing is better. Im trying to fond out what it ws that he did so I can also do it(purely scientific repeatablity of course)

Old-school (British and European) cooking gurus such as Delia Smith, Gordon Ramsay, the Larousse Gastronomique – all say don't wash, but the hip young guns including the scientifically-minded food writer Harold McGee and his disciple Heston Blumenthal say it's nonsense. Give them a good rinse, they say.

Some people say that mushrooms are like sponges and soak up water and will be ruined if you rinse them. Harold McGee wrote about this in his New York Times column 25 years ago. He did experiments and concluded that briefly rinsing mushrooms is unlikely to make much difference at all.

I have always rinsed as I don't like cooked soil in my my mouth, but that might just be a baseless phobia. I don't care. I rinse mushrooms.

This is what I do. With potatoes as well (with then I use hot water)

I bought some "baby belles" at Sherokees Mushroom plant near Cochranville Pa. They reccomend only brushing them but there is som dirt on and I do, even though Im unconvinced, have a bit of concern about relict dirt.
Im going to do an ONION and MUSHROOM sautee and Im going to try to do each separate , caramelize the onions and deeply brown the shrooms and then mix em together to accompany grilled chicken thighs

The British Mushroom Bureau gives out this advice too. I ignore it. I don't want to eat dirt. Even if it's germ-free it's still kind of gritty in your mouth.

If it looks like poop I am washing them. I think it is a mind thing.

I know shrooms are supposed to be earthy but sorry I don't need dirt or poop no matter how scientifically whatever they do it is - I can cleaning the black stuff off them!

I have, of all things, a mushroom brush. I think I got it at our co-0p in northern Califormia: never saw one before or after. I do a fast rinse first - maybe I don't need to, Farmer. It's pretty nifty, a bit hard to describe.
https://www.amazon.com/Clipper-Mill-4144-Mushroom-Brush/dp/B001V98P42

the thing about washing them (as per some Philly chefs) is that WATER is sucked up into the little mushroom pres whenever you add any water (s if to wash or shower or just damply wipe).
Im not sure but I do abhor the compost taste

I tend to always have caramelized onions in glass jars in the freezer and usually but maybe not always have jarred previously sauteed mushroons (with spices I like) in the freezer too... all ready to be a soup or a sauce or just veggies on a plate..

I need a bigger freezer!

do caramelized onions suffer being in the freezer? (tastewise I mean)

Not to me, but I have peculiar taste buds. I have almost complete anosmia (been tested) and at the same time, seem to have a nice sense of taste. Maybe my sense of taste is different from other peoples, but I sure do love food.

My last batch of onions for caramelizing was a poor choice - never again will I veer from spanish brown onions, do you hear me!! I thought when I bought them that they were 'browns' but just smaller, but no, they didn't work for the long treatment I use for sauteing. (Russ Parsons' recipe, here on a2k somewhere).

no water

I tend to kind of roll the mushrooms around in a fresh tea towel before I brush them. The less intervention, the better - to my way of thinking (and my tastebuds).

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flashing back to an old old mushroom thread here - to my horror, I discovered that there were people who always removed the stems from mushrooms - threw them out! gak!!!

I bust em off but use them in the same dish (unless we dry em for soup, then the stems get dried )

I found the thing by Alton Brown, itsa very simple. He weighed a buncha mushroom then he washed em and patted em dry. Then he weighed em again . He did the experiment several times .
The issue was that it was always sid by the chefs that mushrooms TAKE ON WATER and that spoils the flavor.
Qell, hen he washed em and patted em dry they did not weigh appreciably different, sometimes they might have been a centigram or lss more in weight nd sometimes theyd weigh less than when he started the washing.
SO Im gonna try this for the sake of science. I will weigh nd wash nd weigh mushrooms singly nd then in bunch. I will brush some after weighing and then wash some

can you post the mushroom thread???