Mushrooms!

My Canning Cellar

Welcome to my canning cellar!
This is where I don’t want to tell you how to can but rather tell you how I can. Everyone has to do his or her own research and use the information that makes them feel the most comfortable and confident. I utilize the guidelines put out by the national center for home food preservation which I’ll link to in the show description. I do, however, research other tried and true canning ways and decide which seems safe to me and which don’t.

So, season 2, episode 16: mushrooms. We aren’t big mushroom eaters and historically whenever I bought a package, most would go bad before getting eaten. But when I recently saw them on clearance, I bought three one-pound packages of sliced white mushrooms. The store worker was just putting the clearance stickers on them so I knew they would be ok.

So what I used for ingredients were simply those 3 pounds of sliced white mushrooms, and water. I don’t buy distilled water for any of my food canning projects, I just use the town water from the tap.

For equipment I used a large bowl, a large strainer, a dutch oven pot, a slotted spoon, a smaller pot for boiling water, 8 half-pint jars with lids and rings, a debubbler, and a jar remover.

I first soaked the mushrooms in cold water for ten minutes and that was to remove any extra dirt. Then I drained and rinsed them again, then drained and put into a dutch oven pot, covered with water, and brought that to a boil. It boiled for ten minutes. I also boiled some water to use in topping off the jars.

The directions did not say to drain these after this step but I did anyway just to feel more confident about their cleanliness.

I packed 8 half-pint jars with mushrooms, filled the jars with the fresh hot water, used the debubbler around and in the middle of the mushrooms, and topped them off with more hot water to the one inch headspace. If you don’t have an official debubbler or can’t find yours like sometimes is like my dilemma, you could use a thin handle wooden spoon or a chopstick. I never use a knife or anything metal to avoid shocking the glass jars and maybe breaking one.

I then wiped the rims with hot water, put on the lids and finger tightened the rings. I pressure canned them for 45 minutes.

I have rarely bought mushrooms as I said before because my husband usually won’t eat them. But something about smelling their rich aroma as they boiled for the ten minutes has made me want to explore using them more often. I know mushrooming is a huge secretive deal to some people. I once was introduced to an elderly woman for whom I was to be her companion/caretaker, and the first thing she told her niece who was introducing us, was ‘don’t tell her where I go mushrooming!’

Some interesting facts, at least to me, that I found online is that the mushroom capital of the world is said to be Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, as it produces the most fresh cultivated mushroom yearly. Some of the earliest commercial mushroom farms were in French caves during King Louis the 14th’s reign of 1638 to 1715.

There is a honey mushroom that covers 3.4 square miles of land in Eastern Oregon’s Blue Mountains, and it is said to be the largest living organism ever found.

Thanks for visiting my canning cellar. Talk soon. Stay safe.
https://nchfp.uga.edu
https://www.healthycanning.com/canning-mushrooms#wprm-recipe-container-14948
https://www.mushroomcouncil.org/all-about-mushrooms/history