A Magic, Wild, Meaty Treat

I Am Mushrooms …

the

Kate Lowenstein

Daniel Gritzer am not an animal, a plant, or a mineral. Take a minute to get your head around what a crafty 20 Questions choice that makes me, infuriating little brothers and sisters on car rides everywhere. “What is it?” they shout, to which their torturer finally answers: I, mushroom, am a fungus.

I do keep you humans guessing. I am both edible and toxic, vegetarian yet meaty in flavor, wild and domesticated, a contemporary health craze and an ancient remedy. I can send your mind on a wild hallucinogenic flight. I can also kill you. And I come from a mysterious, much larger organism underfoot that you can barely comprehend. I am its fruiting body, in fact, as it spreads invisibly underground or through the fibers of a log. You can pick me as you do an apple off a tree, but you will leave almost all the superorganism behind.

Those rootlike threads you occasionally spy on my stem? They are not roots but fragments of my spreading life-form. Those delicate frills sheltered beneath my shelf or cap? They are marvels of evolutionary engineering, gills from which I release my spores by the billions. I like to think of them as nature’s origami—if you could lay the unfolded gills of just one button mushroom flat, they’d cover a desktop.

I’d wager that when you hear my name, you imagine the umbrellacapped toadstool of not only white button mushrooms but also fairy tales, fables, Super Mario Bros., and

I

Smurfs. But that image is falsely narrow. I can grow like shelves on a tree trunk, round like marshmallows, translucent and gelatinous like jellyfish, and in a cascade of spines that in the case of the lion’s mane mushroom look like a long white beard.

Even the ubiquitous white button mushroom started as a peculiarity, discovered in Pennsylvania nestled in a bed of brown cremini mushrooms. Though it looks different from the cremini, both are variants of the same species. (The portobello, meanwhile, is just an extra-large cremini.)

In the kitchen, no matter my variety—oyster, shiitake, enoki; there are hundreds of edible ones—i add deep, savory flavor. I am one of nature’s best meat stand-ins for flavor, texture, and heartiness. I just scratch that itch, making me appeal to vegetarians and omnivores alike. To properly bring out all that flavor, cook off all my water over high heat, then brown me in a pan. Use me in a filling for pastas and dumplings such as ravioli and pierogi. Cook me with cream or tomatoes, and I’ll make a pasta so rich and filling you won’t miss the meat. I’m great on meat though, including as duxelles, the thick mixture of minced mushrooms and shallots that is a key ingredient in beef Wellington.

There’s some misguided kitchen folklore about how you should never wash a mushroom because it strips away flavor. This is almost always